Say that Iraq lets UN weapons inspectors back into the country. The inspectors are searching some office building or a factory or something to that effect and they come across a nuke or a chem/bio weapon in the search. What happens next? Do we just start bombing Iraq? Do the inspectors put the weapon in the back of thier pickup and carry it out of the country? Do we tell Iraq to get rid of it? If they find a nuke what do they do to destroy it? Do they call in special teams of people to destry this stuff once it is found or are the inspectors responsible for destroying it themselves?
In a nutshell my question is “What happens if we find a WMD in the basement of some facility in Iraq?”.
First, Ann Coulter would bleat and screech about “how we have to turn Iraq into a parking lot NOW.”
Then we’d have to hope that Shrub wouldn’t be too rash.
From what I’ve read, the inspectors don’t carry with them the tools to actually destroy nukes/chem/bio weapons. They would probably sit on them until those with the equipment and know-how arrived.
I am trying to find the source for it, but somewhere on the DoE website once was a report on just what you do with old nuclear weapons, and it had an “addendum” on what one would do with a captured nuclear weapon, possibly booby-trapped.
If it was transportable, there was an elaborate procedure for moving it to an oceanic trench, and dropping it in, letting it settle about 5 miles down. IIRC, there were huge evacuation procedures and such.
If not, then the recommendation was to clear as much “overburden” from wherever the weapon was, and to try destroying it with MASSIVE amounts of explosives. Clearing the overburden was so there was the option of destroying it from aircraft or via missile.
Now, this wasn’t in the report, but I recalled a professor saying once that he had worked on a “bomb buster” gun, which was essentially a super high-velocity high-powered mounted gun (about the size of a small, but long howitzer) which fired tungsten or (ironically) depleted uranium shells at enormous speeds and energies. I believe he said it was a “2-pound slug” travelling at “7000-8000 fps”. This was supposedly meant to be operated remotely (faaaaar remote), and it would shatter the bomb and uranium core into in-fusibility, thus preventing the nuclear explosion. He had no idea if one was ever built for that purpose, but a reduced-scale “proof of concept” was developed.