Wilson’s case wasn’t that he had inspected the country, because in fact he never got out of the capital to inspect anything.
It was that IAEA inspections and French control made it impossible for uranium smuggling to take place.
Later we found out that IAEA doesn’t inspect yellow-cake. Yellow-cake producing countries were requested to self-report. And in any case, Niger national law didn’t allow IAEA inspectors to enter the country.
That, and we found out that Libya’s yellow-cake was smuggled in from Niger.
I had forgotten the Libya yellowcake part. thanks for the reminder.
Yellowcake is unprocessed uranium ore. It is more than 99% U-238 which is not useful for a bomb. You build bombs with U-235. The less than 1% U-235 found in yellowcake needs to be extracted through gas diffusion or centrifuges like what Iran is currently using. And the U-235 needs to be concentrated to a level of 90%.
If Saddam had been processing yellowcake we would have found miles of gas diffusion tubing or labs full of gas centrifuges. If anything of that sort was found it has never been made public.