Replies

Regarding:

"Here's what I don't get too. Why don't we hear more about the mustard gas shells that the Polish army has been finding?"

ISTR that the Poles found (not have been finding) empty rockets and test showed that they had never been filled
with anything.

Regarding:

"Why wasn't more made of the sarin shells used as IED's"

Probably that is because your use of the plural was
incorrect. Only one such sarin shell has turned
up that way. But a mustard shell was found abandoned
by the side of a road, evidently an aborted attempt
to set an IED.

IIRC there was at least one cache of mustard shells in
Iraq that had been declared and inventoried and was
awaiting destruction when UNMOVIC was advised to leave.

It has also been pointed out that up to 10% of US
artillery shells fail to explode on impact. Iraqi
insurgents looking for IED material could easily
find unexploded chemical munitions at old battlefields
and test ranges in Iraq. It would be no surprise if
the Iraqi munitions had a rather high dud rate.

Heck, there is a fair chance you could find them in
the US too.

--

FF

Why did Saddam have 500 tons of yellowcake in the first place if not for the purposes of developing a nuclear weapon? His Nuclear Power Plant was bombed by the Israelis and I don't think he ever tried to rebuild it. And why would Iraq with its enormous oil reserves and abundant hydroelectric power generation system have any need for nuclear power in the first place? Regardless of whether Saddam had the means to enrich his 500 tons of yellowcake or not, we obviously had no way of knowing what he capabilities were. We did the right thing and I wish Clinton had done at least bombed North Korea before they developed the bomb.