A disturbing article in the WP which appears to confirm the worst fears ,expressed by some of us, that the war ,by breaking down central control, was likely to lead to lead to the dispersal of Iraqi unconventional weapons and technology.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10888-2003May3.html
“The survey, conducted by a U.S. Special Forces detachment and eight nuclear experts from a Pentagon office called the Direct Support Team, appeared to offer fresh evidence that the war has dispersed the country’s most dangerous technologies beyond anyone’s knowledge or control.”
However the administration has better things to do than single-mindedly hunting down WMD: like quarelling with the IAEA.:rolleyes:
"U.S. authorities do not know what is missing, if anything, because of an ongoing conflict between the Bush administration and the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, as well as a dispute within the administration about how much to involve the IAEA in Iraq. The unresolved struggle has kept U.S. forces out of Tuwaitha's nuclear storage areas, but a brief outdoor inspection on April 10 found the door to one of them had been breached."
Amazingly the looting continued after the US army assigned troops to protect the site.:
“Employees of the research center – or Iraqis who said they were employees – had been coming in by the score for more than two weeks. The 3rd Infantry’s security detail had no Arabic speaker and could not verify their stories. In addition, looters had been scavenging inside continuously since U.S. forces took control. At the peak, there were 400 a day. On Friday, the U.S. soldiers detained 62 of them, but many more got away.”
Given the centrality of WMD to the justification of this war this is unbelievable. If the US doesn’t quickly control all the WMD stocks and allows some of them to be stolen the entire war will have proved self-defeating and it will have increased the chance of terrorists acquiring WMD. Unfortunately it appears ,more and more, that this particular horse has bolted out of the stable. Let’s just hope that Iraq never had that many WMD in the first place.
Assuming this is the site I think it is, what’s missing is some low-grade uranium. This is not a recent event, actually, I’m not sure why the Post is just getting around to it. This happened almost a month ago. That’s not WMD. It’s hard or impossible (I forget which) to convert into a weapon. A dirty bomb, maybe. A nuke? Unlikely, as I think you’d need processing equipment and/or a reactor.
Not that any of this is good news. But you assume at the end that Iraq had WMD and that some are now missing, neither of which has been demonstrated to be true.
Anyway, here’s a link to a reprint of the AP story about it:
Yeah I know that ,technically, radioactive material isn’t WMD but it’s definitely not the kind of material that should be left lying around ; as Squink notes it can be used to make dirty bombs.
The larger point is the inability of the US to secure these sites quickly; how do we know that sites with real WMD haven’t been looted? It appears likely even if we don’t have specific evidence that it’s happened.
Well, you don’t. If you don’t even have knowledge they exist, you obviously can’t know what’s happened to them. I’m not disagreeing at all with your basic point, or even most of the other ones like the need to get the IAEA in there. I was just quibbling with the assumption that weapons were stolen from this site.
“I was just quibbling with the assumption that weapons were stolen from this site.”
OK. though I don’t think I specifically said that WMD were stolen from this site.
Anyway I think this issue is has not been given nearly the attention it deserves. There seems to be an assumption that now that the Saddam regime is gone any possible WMD are no longer dangerous. This is extremely foolish and pretty much the opposite of the truth. Without central control these weapons are more likely to be taken and sold to terrorists.
I always thought it was one of the best arguments against the war and the events of the last few weeks have reinforced that opinion.
“It is still not clear what has been lost in the sacking of Iraq’s nuclear establishment. But it is well documented that looters roamed unrestrained among stores of chemical elements and scientific files that would speed development, in the wrong hands, of a nuclear or radiological bomb. Many of the files, and some of the containers that held radioactive sources, are missing.”
This is a major failure. We can hope that nothing truly dangerous was stolen and that ,if it was, it won’t end up in the hands of terrorists. But hope is not a strategy. You can bet that Al Quaeda et al will be sniffing around in Iraq for WMD. If they do in fact exist it’s hard to see how the US , given its general inability to control sensitive sites, is going to stop terrorists from obtaining them. Of course this defeats the entire purpose of the war and will leave US national security worse than before.