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Politics : I Will Continue to Continue, to Pretend....

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To: Sully- who wrote (23725)	11/4/2006 12:33:44 PM
From: Sully-	of 35834

Iraq Nuke Program: On The Other Hand Posted by SeeDubya JunkYardBlog From the 2002 NIE: <<< How quickly Iraq will obtain its first nuclear weapon depends on when it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material. If Baghdad acquires sufficient fissile material from abroad it could make a nuclear weapon within several months to a year. Without such material from abroad, Iraq probably would not be able to make a weapon until 2007 to 2009, owing to inexperience in building and operating centrifuge facilities to produce highly enriched uranium and challenges in procuring the necessary equipment and expertise. ... In a much less likely scenario, Baghdad could make enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon by 2005 to 2007 if it obtains suitable centrifuge tubes this year and has all the other materials and technological expertise necessary to build production-scale uranium enrichment facilities. >>> There were a lot of things wrong in this NIE, we now believe. But a one-year completion date in 2002 doesn't seem quite as implausible to me as it did last night. And the interesting thing about the NYT report now becomes the verb tense: <<< Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away. >>> They said it in 2002, and appear to have been wrong; if there are (inconveniently unnamed) experts still saying today that Saddam was one year from ignition, well, who are they and why haven't we heard from them? Meanwhile Ray Robison is looking at the Senate's assessment of pre-war intelligence and finds this nugget: <<< The Committee told Saddam that a nuclear weapon would be ready within 18-24 months of acquiring the fissile material. >>> I'm still skeptical, though, that this is what the NYT's "experts" meant. Iran has a working nuclear program chugging along now and everyone knows it; but Saddam was somehow able to keep his a secret and pretty much has to this day. He didn't have a reactor, and the centrifuges he had were buried in scientists' gardens. I guess if he wasn't trying to centrifuge his own U235 it's plausible, since he would basically be assembling a bomb instead of fabricating the explosive payload from scratch. But even then, for this one-year-from-boom capability to vanish more or less without a trace before the invasion? I still think they were talking about 1991, even though I'd like to be wrong. Convince me. Tell me every last detail. junkyardblog.net fas.org junkyardblog.net nytimes.com rayrobison.typepad.com hotair.com

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