Free Republic

Prosecutors in Stuttgart, southwest Germany, have accused three German businessmen of attempting to export materiel to North Korea for likely use in the Stalinist country's nuclear program, Der Spiegel reports in its next issue, to be published Monday. The weekly magazine says the German government intercepted a cargo shipment last April in Hamburg destined for North Korea including 214 aluminum tubes weighing 22 tonnes. The tubes are a crucial element in the production of enriched uranium. Prosecutors suspect the director of a company called Optronic, based in southern Koenigsbronn, of violating laws on arms control and export. He was jailed...

<p>A key Iraqi scientist recently told the CIA that high-strength aluminum tubes bought by Baghdad weren't meant for nuclear bomb production, as President Bush suggested in his State of the Union address, two experts on Iraq's nuclear program say.</p> <p>Mahdi Shukur Obeidi, who headed a uranium-enrichment unit vital to Iraq's pre-1991 bomb plans, "also said that since '91 they hadn't resurrected a nuclear weapon program," according to ex-Iraq inspector David Albright, an American physicist who acted as go-between for Obeidi to talk to U.S. authorities a few weeks ago.</p>

GERMAN prosecutors are questioning the head of a company suspected of trying to export aluminum tubes to North Korea that could be used for making nuclear arms, the Stuttgart prosecutors' office said. The company shipped tubes listing China as the destination without a permit from Germany's Bafa Export Agency, prosecutors' spokesman Eckhard Maak said. The deal was arranged by a North Korean middleman, arousing the suspicion that the real destination was North Korea, he said. "It's a hypothesis right now that North Korea was the final destination," Maak said in an interview. Whether the purchaser was North Korean or Chinese,...

The German government has intercepted a shipment of German made aluminum tubes probably destined for use in North Korea's nuclear programme, according to a German magazine.The weekly magazine Der Spiegel said in its issue due to be published on Monday that 22 tonnes of aluminum tubes, essential in the manufacture of enriched uranium, were loaded onto a French ship in Hamburg in early April just as the German government vetoed the shipment.The German government alerted the French authorities, who ordered the ships captain to unload the containers in Egypt.Officially the tubes were on their way to a Chines aeronautics company,...

Tubes of Mass Destruction By Simon Henderson, adjunct scholar The Washington Institute for Near East Policy Weekly Standard, September 23, 2002 As the advance towards war against Iraq continues, the Bush administration has started lobbing missiles at hardline liberals ever unconvinced about the threat Saddam Hussein poses to his region and the world. The administration's game presumably is to make these diehards change their minds and to win over skeptical members of the public. One of the latest missiles involves aluminum tubes. But the story here is complicated, and thus might confuse rather than clarify the danger of Saddam. On...

Some Evidence on Iraq Called Fake U.N. Nuclear Inspector Says Documents on Purchases Were Forged By Joby WarrickWashington Post Staff WriterSaturday, March 8, 2003; Page A01 A key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program appears to have been fabricated, the United Nations' chief nuclear inspector said yesterday in a report that called into question U.S. and British claims about Iraq's secret nuclear ambitions. ..... Knowledgeable sources familiar with the forgery investigation described the faked evidence as a series of letters between Iraqi agents and officials in the central African nation of Niger. The documents had been...