No positives in here for anyone involved in the security side...
VIENNA (Reuters) - Hundreds of tons of explosives are missing from a site near Baghdad that was part of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s dismantled nuclear arms program but never secured by the U.S. military, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Monday.
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Nuclear Watchdog Says Explosive Missing In Iraq
(Reuters Video)
IAEA Says Tons of Iraq Explosives Missing
(AP Video)
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The missing 377 tons of high explosives, monitored by inspectors from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency until the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq (news - web sites) in March 2003, could potentially be used to make a detonator for a nuclear bomb, blow up an airplane or a building or in numerous other military and civilian applications, arms experts said.
About a pound of a related compound was enough to bring down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, killing 170.
Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology informed the IAEA two weeks ago that the explosives had been "lost after April 9, 2003, through the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security," the watchdog agency told the 15-nation U.N. Security Council.
The New York Times, which broke the story on Monday, said arms experts feared the most immediate use of the explosives would be to attack U.S. or Iraqi forces, which have come under increasing fire ahead of Iraq's elections due in January.
Diplomats at the IAEA warned the materials could also easily be secreted out of Iraq and sold to countries with nuclear ambitions like neighboring Iran or terrorist groups.
The IAEA has been barred from most of Iraq since the war and has watched from afar as the former nuclear sites it once monitored have been stripped by looters.
Vienna diplomats said the IAEA had cautioned the United States about the danger of the explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told U.S. officials about the need to keep them secured.
U.S. presidential challenger John Kerry (news - web sites) quickly pounced on the issue, accusing President Bush (news - web sites) of committing a massive blunder in failing to safeguard the explosives.
KERRY SEES 'GREAT BLUNDER'
"This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the greatest blunders of this administration, and the incredible incompetence of this president and this administration has put our troops at risk and this country at greater risk," Kerry told supporters in Dover, New Hampshire.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (news - web sites) John Danforth said the Bush administration was investigating the matter.
Washington was told of the seriousness of the matter on Oct. 15, IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said in Vienna. Bush was informed days later, White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.
Prior to the war, 215 tons of HMX explosives had been sealed and tagged with the IAEA emblem while stored at Iraq's sprawling Al Qaqaa military facility. Some 156 tons of RDX and 6.4 tons of PETN were also stored at the Al Qaqaa site and monitored by the IAEA.
Iraq was allowed to keep some explosives for civilian use after the IAEA completed its dismantling of Saddam's covert nuclear weapons program after the 1991 Gulf war.
A Western diplomat close to the IAEA, who declined to be identified, said it was hard to understand why the U.S. military had failed to secure the facility.
"This was a very well known site. If you could have picked a few sites that you would have to secure then ... Al Qaqaa would certainly be one of the main ones," the diplomat said.
At the Pentagon (news - web sites), spokesman Bryan Whitman said Washington did not believe the missing materials posed a danger of nuclear proliferation but would find it "nearly impossible to verify" whether they had left Iraq or were in insurgent hands.
Saddam Hussein's government may have moved or destroyed them before the war, or they may have been destroyed in the course of battle by U.S. bombing, U.S. defense officials said.
One defense official acknowledged Al Qaqaa was "well known as a storage depot for conventional explosives" but doubted U.S. forces made safeguarding it "a high-priority location."
"You just can't leave a guard force at all these places you find. If you leave a squad at all 10,000 places that are known so far, then there's 50,000 (troops) out of action," said another U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. (Additional reporting by Javier E. David in New York, Patricia Wilson in Dover, N.H., Will Dunham at the Pentagon in Washington and Irwin Arieff at the United Nations in New York) |
