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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BigBull who wrote (60756)	12/9/2002 2:50:29 PM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 281500

I was not comparing the two at all, I used your post to segue into mine.

To: BigBull who wrote (60756)	12/9/2002 3:01:24 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

>>Saddam 'was close to making A-bomb' FOREIGN STAFF A SENIOR scientific adviser to Saddam Hussein hinted yesterday that Baghdad came close to developing a nuclear bomb. General Amir al-Saadi, who was trained in Britain, was briefing reporters on Iraq’s weapons declaration when he was asked about its nuclear weapons programme. "We have the complete documentation from design to all the other things," he said. "We haven’t reached the final assembly of a bomb nor tested it." Baghdad stuck to its claims that it had no weapons of mass destruction - nuclear, biological, or chemical. But it is no secret that Iraq tried to develop nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported in 1995 on efforts to use fuel from atomic research reactors to build a nuclear bomb. The programme was only halted by air raids during the Gulf War. Nuclear facilities in Iraq were inspected and tagged by weapons inspectors after the war and equipment used to make weapons-grade uranium was destroyed. However, claims Iraq is still pursuing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons are at the heart of US and British claims that Saddam’s regime is lying when it denies it has them. The US claimed in September that Baghdad tried to buy thousands of aluminium tubes used to enrich uranium. Tony Blair, in his dossier on Iraq’s weapons programmes, cited intelligence reports that Saddam had tried to acquire uranium in Africa. "It is for others to judge, it is for the IAEA to judge how close we were," Gen al-Saadi said. "If I tell you we were close, it is subjective, maybe [self-] promotional." The 12,000-page Iraqi dossier on its weapons programme was yesterday delivered to the United Nations’ headquarters in New York. But before any part of the document is made public, officials will weed out any information that could help terrorists make a nuclear weapon. The nuclear section of the dossier, said to number 2,000 pages, will be analysed at the IAEA headquarters in Vienna.<< thescotsman.co.uk

To: BigBull who wrote (60756)	12/9/2002 5:57:39 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi BigBull; The one thing that inspections can find but cannot destroy is the humans who've been working on WMDs. As soon as inspections are stopped Iraq will go right back to developing the things. But while sanctions may be lifted even as soon as towards the end of 2003, inspections will continue for years, or until Saddam falls. The other possibility is that those Iraqi scientists will get jobs working on WMDs for other countries, probably other Arab countries. I'm guessing that this has already happened, though I don't remember seeing it mentioned in the press. History has repeatedly shown that the humans are far more important, in terms of technology, than the equipment. Germany and Japan had their factories bombed to crumbs and their economies destroyed, but were back on their feet in a few years. The USSR stole huge numbers of factories and equipment from East Germany, but it never did them much good. There is also this incident from the War of 1812, where a few men walked into the wilderness, and in a few months, built a shipyard and launched several more or less cutting edge warships: "We have met the enemy and they are ours: two ships, two brigs, one schooner, and one sloop." brigniagara.org -- Carl P.S. Two posts back I said (or meant to say) that the lack of merchant marine would not seriously reduce the ability of the US to defeat Iraq in a war. But what I should have added was that nevertheless, the logistics required to fight a war would be extremely noticeable (far above the level seen so far), and has not yet started. Right now there are only a couple ROROs activated, and the news reports have been unclear on how many voyages they've made or are going to make. A real war would see close to 100 ships running full time, along with pleas for retired merchant mariners to come back to work.