Posted on 12/06/2002 3:52:00 PM PST by SirChas
Saddam Has Nukes, Ex-Weapons Inspector Says
A former U.N. weapons inspector who was renowned for his ability to ferret out Iraqi weapons violations during the late 1990's charged point blank on Thursday that Saddam Hussein now has nuclear weapons.
"I have no doubt that he has nukes," Bill Tierney told nationally syndicated radio host Sean Hannity.
"He's going to use non-persistent chemicals against his own people to put down an insurrection," the ace inspector predicted, before adding chillingly, "He'll use bio and nukes against us."
Stunned by the revelation, the radio host pressed for confirmation:
HANNITY: You have no doubt that he has nukes? Or he's close (to getting them)?
TIERNEY: I have no doubt that he has nukes.
HANNITY: You think he has nuclear weapons.
TIERNEY: Yes.
HANNITY: Why are you the only (former weapons inspector) saying that?
TIERNEY: Well, there's a few more. One reason why is, during the 90's in the intelligence community, there was just a pathological risk aversion. The reason being was that our president at the time, Bill Clinton, fundamentally changed the purpose of the United States military from fighting and winning wars to crisis management and keeping his poll numbers up.
Now, if you're not out to win, there's no need to take risks. And so what you found is people being very guarded about everything, every kind of assessment you could make. (End of Excerpt)
Before he ran afoul of the system Tierney had built a powerful reputation for credibility, prompting the U.N. to personally recruit him in 1996 for the task of inspecting some of Saddam's most sensitive suspected weapons facilities.
But he was forced to resign two years later amidst charges he was spying for the U.S. Tierney now says he was locked out for doing what he figured was his job - giving the Pentagon targets for military action.
"What I did was identified those people who have sold their souls to keep Saddam in power. I made it my goal to find every place where they are," Tierney told the London's Daily Mirror in October.
Still, his aggressive pursuit of Saddam's weapons violations won him more than a few fans at U.S. Central Command, where Tierney's boss, Army Brig. Gen. Keith Alexander, wrote in one of his job evaluations: "His ability to consistently seek and identify priority target intelligence information is uncanny and is the characteristic that separates him from his contemporaries."
Tierney told Hannity that a 1997 inspection he attempted to conduct at Saddam's Jabal Makhul presidential palace lead him to suspect that the Iraqi dictator already had the bomb.
"Certain things convinced me that they had proscribed items at this presidential site. That led to the inspection in September 1997 where we were locked out. There was something about that. The just came up and said, 'There will be no inspection. Good Day.' And they walked off."
Tierney said the rebuff was "completely different" from other inspections of sensitive sites, where some sort of compromise was always worked out.
Another sign of sinister activity: As Tierney and his team were being turned away, a U.N. helicopter attempting to overfly Jabal Makhul nearly crashed when an Iraqi official on board lunged at the controls.
"That was a distraction to keep that helicopter from going over to the other side of the mountain to see what they were doing" at the facility, said Tierney.
He described Jabal Makhul as a "gigantic" complex of warehouses and underground tunnels, before noting that last year the London Times reported Saddam was storing nuclear weapons in bunkers in and around the Hamrin Mountains.
"There is only one heavily guarded place in the Hamrin Mountains," Tierney told Hannity. "And that's where we were, Jabal Makhul."
Still, despite efforts by Iraqi officials to keep inspectors away from Jabal Makhul, U.N. officials continued to give Saddam the benefit of the doubt, he complained.
"If you had ambiguous reporting; it could mean he has the nukes, it could mean that he doesn't." he said. "Normally the call would be, 'Oh well, that doesn't confirm so therefore he's still developing. He doesn't have it,'" Tierney said he was told.
The ex-inspector predicted that Saddam would likely use his nukes, "maybe (in) Israel, maybe here."
Calling the current inspections "a complete total waste of time," Tierney warned, "You have a leader of a country who's bent on stealing, killing and destroying. And it is time to resolve the issue and solve it. Crisis management is over."
"There's way too much at stake," he added. "We could lose millions more of our citizens unless we wake up and take care of this."
When you have a limited amount of nuclear material, it is perfectly reasonable to run the "tests" in a combat environment. What do you have to lose? If it fails to go boom, it would have done so in the test environment too. If it does go boom, mission accomplished.
I suspect Saddam's definition of a "combat environment" will be somewhere in Israel or a major U.S. city. He won't do it personally. He will let his Al Qaida buddies attend to that task while he watches the homefront.
The so called "Little Boy" atomic bomb the US dropped on Japan had never been tested. It worked fine. The "Fat Man" type was tested, once, the second bomb of that type was dropped on Japan. Both the test and the "live" drop, worked fine. So I"d say the odds were pretty good. Saddam's designers have access to computers that would have made the Manhatten Project designers shake their heads in disblief. So do you for that matter, but likely what Saddam has is step up from your average PC, maybe a couple of them. Would they get the best possible yield in the smallest possible package? Probably not, but they wouldn't be likely to get a fizzle either.
I read the bottom. Barf!
Historically, 50%. The Trinity test in July 1945 was of the implosion bomb (what was to become Fat Man), while the first gun bomb (Little Boy) exploded was over Hiroshima. The scientists knew that the gun bomb would work as advertised, while they didn't know whether the implosion bomb would.
Morever, even if the first Iraqi bomb doesn't reach critical mass, what'll be left is a dirty radiological bomb, which would serve the Islamists/Saddam's purposes just as well. If that first explosion doesn't happen in enemy territory, Saddam knows that UN or no UN, Iraq becomes a self-lighted glass parking lot.
The hard part is not making the bomb, the hard part is getting or producing the weapons grade uranium or the plutonium.
What if one (or more) of the Pakistani tests back several years ago was an Iraqi nuke? You don't suppose that the Iraqi nuke people and the Paki nuke people might have talked? Nahhh! Way to outlandish!
Read the book "Saddam's Bombmaker," the autobiography of Iraqi defector Khidhir Hamza. The story is that as of several years ago, they had one or two small nukes which might or might not work. Fortunately, they're quite heavy, and Iraq probably lacks the ability to transport them very far, and they deteriorate about as quickly as the Iraqis can produce them.
The danger is real, but it's hard to be sure. This must be making US planning for the Iraq invasion even more difficult than otherwise -- all military principle says to concentrate attacking forces, but you don't want 20,000 Americans all sitting within a single square kilometer right over one of these maybe-it-works-maybe-it-doesn't monsters.
Most likely, as in the book "Is Paris Burning?" the dictator's generals will refuse to follow the dictator's scorched earth orders in full measure. However, the danger is real. I hope no one is assuming that we can use time better than Saddam can.
I'd deport the terrorist ass-kisser [Ritter] even if a nuke doesn't go off here. But if we can prove that he lied under oath about what he knew of Iraq's capabilities, he should be executed for treason.
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