Posted on 11/12/2005 7:48:27 AM PST by Carl/NewsMax
Though President Bush didn't mention it in his speech yesterday rebutting critics of his administration's use of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, experts say that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled enough partially enriched uranium to produce at least one full-fledged nuclear bomb.
Commenting on Saddam's enriched uranium stash after the U.S. Energy Department removed it to Oak Ridge, Tenn., in June 2004, top physicist Ivan Oelrich told the Associated Press:
"[Saddam's] 1.95 tons of low-enriched uranium could be used to produce enough highly enriched uranium to make a single nuclear bomb."
Oelrich, a leading member of the Federation of American Scientists, is not alone in that assessment.
Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, told the New York Times that Saddam's partially enriched uranium "could have been further enriched to make it useful in a weapon."
After the U.S. removed Saddam's nuke fuel stockpile, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi confirmed that it posed a great danger to the region's security interests.
"These materials, which are potential weapons of mass murder, are not welcome in our country and their production is unacceptable," Allawi told Agence France Press.
Even Saddam's 500-ton un-enriched uranium stockpile, which he stored at the same nuclear weapons research facility where inspectors found his partially enriched stash, posed a potential threat.
In a March 2003 op-ed piece for London's Evening Standard, Norman Dombey, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Sussex, calculated that Saddam's yellowcake could have yielded a staggering nuclear arsenal.
"You have a warehouse containing 500 tons of natural uranium," Dombey wrote. "You need 25 kilograms of U235 to build one weapon. How many nuclear weapons can you build?
"The answer is 142 [nuclear bombs]," he said.
The reason the President doesn't mention this in speeches is that, unlike FR, he actually understands the status of the Iraqi Uranium and realizes he'd be embarassed and ripped to shreds if he attempted to claim it as the WMD justification for the war.
Everyone had known about the 2 tons of LEU and the Yellowcake for a decade, it was monitored, it wasn't a UN resolution violation, thus it wasn't cited as a justification for Gulf War II before the war.
Main Stream Media Policy on this ignore, or bury this on page g12.
"Wait Saddam had no WMD's....Someone is lying here, there needs to be an investigation into this cooked intelligence."
Are you suggesting that partially enriched Uranium constitutes a WMD?
There have been dozens of threads like this on a routine basis for the last couple of years, and they all go the same. Maybe me and 1 other person pointing out the reality and 50 people completely ignoring it.
Yes. Hell. The book titled BULLSEYE IRAQ ISBN: 0-425-11259-4,1987/1988 by Dan McKinnon, Berkely series, gives all the details on how he obtained yellowcake from various sources such as Niger, Portugal, how/when he purchased hot labs from Italy, the reactors from France and Russia, various equipment from Germany etc., centifuge equipment the whole enchallata. And that was all written exposed in the late 80s. After the Israelis bombed the Osirik nuclear plant at the al-Tywautha facility 12 miles southeast of Baghdad, he was set back. But prior to that for a long while the while Iraq was still (on paper only) a signatory to the NPT (non-nuclear poliferation treaty), the IAEA where quite aware of his nuclear activities. They knew he was working on Uranium enrichment processes simply because he had obtained all the required equipment. And his greed was so great he made no bones about constantly pressuring the French and Russians to sell him very highly enriched fuel rods, well exceeding what was required for the reactors he purchased from them for commercial power generation. The IAEA was totally helpless, being on scribes in effect with no powers of policing, so he got away with it. Only the main Tammuz 1 reactor under the main buildings dome was destroyed. Much of the whole facility did not receive a scratch during the Israeli attack. So he had years to continue working at final refinement techniques in order to produce fissionable grade material.
If you read this book then compare the tons of stuff that has been regurgitated over and over again, it almost becomes a very sad comedy after awhile. Nothing new has come forth that has not been known for a number of years.
Although I suspect there WERE WMD's in Iraq and that we were right to go in for a number of reasons, any one of which was sufficient by itself, Newsmax is not exactly the most reliable source of news. I've read many articles there that I could never substantiate through ANY other source.
Fall of 2002, sometime after October 9 - A report from the U.S. Navy suggests that uranium being transferred from Niger to Iraq was discovered in a warehouse in Cotonou, Benin. The report indicates that the broker for the deal is willing to talk about it, but, mysteriously he is never contacted by the CIA or military intelligence.
Page 59 of the Senate Report confirms that this Navy report was received at CIA. The DO at CIA, when questioned about this report made a number of excuses with the best being "no one thought to do that". The question was "why didn't you check on this report".
HELLO?
The broker for this deal said that it was the President of Niger making the sale. They have his name and phone numbers!
Mr. Wilson's excellent adventure was in February 2002!
No one ever claimed he had a functional nuclear weapon at the time of the US led invasion. Only that he was trying to pursue one and was close. We all assumed he had chemical and biological WMD. He did. He had even used them in the past. But he did not have large stockpiles. Concerning the nuclear weapons, he needed the centrifuges to make the partially enriched uranium into highly enriched uranium to actually produce a weapon. Apparently, Libya has admitted assisting Saddam off site with this process. Can we at least assume that Saddam was actively pursuing a nuclear weapon ? Was the Israeli destruction of Saddam's French built reactor, warranted ?
Get the picture?
bookmark
"So this establishes an ongoing uranium enrichment program"
No it doesn't, it establishes exactly the opposite. It establishes that partially enriched uranium that was catalogued and sealed by the IAEA after 1991 was still in the same place and same condition after 2002.
If Libya destroyed their nuclear program, that would also eliminate the nuclear material through which that tell tale nuclear signature could be made. If Libya was refining Iraq's yellow cake and shipping the final product to Iraq, one could establish the chain of production if one could get samples to retrieve that signature which would implicate Libya as a collaborator.
"Can we at least assume that Saddam was actively pursuing a nuclear weapon ? Was the Israeli destruction of Saddam's French built reactor, warranted ?"
If you're asking whether Saddam was actively pursuing a nuclear weapon in 1981, when the Israelis bombed Osirak, then the answer is clearly yes. Not sure what that has to do with more recent events though.
See, so Bush lied. He said "weaponS", meaning more than one. So there was nothing to worry about. /sarc
Okay. Let me see if I understand the current Iraq WMD position. Saddam was pursuing nuclear weapons back in 1981 when Israel bombed the French-built reactor. That is apparently an accepted fact. Since that time Saddam fought a decade long bloody war with Iran, he used chemical weapons on Iran, gassed his own Kurdish population and then invaded Kuwait. During that same time period he apparently decided that pursuing nuclear weapons was not in his best interests ? Why then did he possess the partially enriched uranium that was verified by the UN ?
Apparently if you are a leftist trying to impeach Bush, you must also state that we should have not invaded German occupied France during WWII. After all, we had no proof that Hitler possessed a nuclear weapon. Hitler never attacked the US mainland. He was not responsible for Pearl Harbor. There was no collaboration established between Hitler and the Japanese Emperor over the attack on Pearl Harbor. Germany had used chemical WMD in the past during World War I, but they had not used them during World War II. So if you are a leftist, France should still be occupied territory. The way things are going in France right now, it may yet become occupied territory.
Remember this article? It seems no one else does either:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38213
No one remembers when one week before the election WaPo reported that 10,000 tons of weapons were missing either.
"Since that time Saddam fought a decade long bloody war with Iran, he used chemical weapons on Iran, gassed his own Kurdish population and then invaded Kuwait. During that same time period he apparently decided that pursuing nuclear weapons was not in his best interests ?"
Not really sure what you're basing that assertion on.
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