Posted on 05/28/2004 1:31:03 PM PDT by FairOpinion
VIENNA (Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear watchdog has said in a confidential report it has found traces of high and low enriched uranium on Libyan nuclear centrifuges, as it found on identical Pakistani-made centrifuges in Iran last year.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also said in the report, obtained by Reuters on Friday, that a university in Tripoli had "a research laboratory and associated equipment that would be of some use for supporting nuclear weapon related research and development".
However, the agency said it had found no evidence that Libya had begun building a nuclear warhead.
The agency said unanswered questions about Tripoli's nuclear weapons programme, abandoned in December 2003, included "the sources of low enriched and high enriched uranium contamination found on gas centrifuge equipment in Libya".
The uranium traces on the centrifuges, which Libya bought on a black market linked to Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, would appear to support Iran's assertion that bomb-grade uranium found on its centrifuges last year had come from the machines' previous owners in Pakistan.
But in order to verify that the contamination came from Pakistan -- referred into the IAEA report as the "supplier state" -- the IAEA needs "to confirm this conclusion by taking and analysing environmental samples from that supplier state".
Diplomats close to the IAEA said Islamabad has refused to let the IAEA take samples of its enriched uranium.
Centrifuges are used to purify uranium for use as nuclear fuel in power plants, or when very highly enriched, for bombs.
The U.N. watchdog said Libya had "provided prompt, unhindered access to all locations requested by the agency and to all relevant equipment and material declared to be in Libya."
Libya has also provided clear answers to most of the IAEA's questions, the report said.
"However, (they) have not always been able to provide supporting documents to augment their short December 2003 timeline" of Libya's weapons programme. The IAEA said this limited its ability to fully verify Libya's declarations.
We keep finding WMD all over the place. Can anyone still really believe that Iraq didn't have any?
But, but what about those poor terrorist prisoners with panties on their heads?
Iraq obviously did, and used them a lot in the past. But what we know and what we say for, e. g., political purposes may be entirely different.
The problem is the the Democrats ARE using them for political purposes.
Sure. The highly enriched uranium they just said they found isn't evidence of trying to build nuclear warheads. The Libyans and Iranians just wanted to have smiles that glow in the dark, by using U-235 fillings in their teeth.
Exactly. Don't you just love the media, the way they try to minimize what terrorists do and totally blow out of proportion anything the US does, like the prisoner mistreatment.
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