Mish you are tripping out. You know next to nothing but want so hard to believe that our White House thinks like you do...that they'd say anything to get what they want. In fact that is exactly what you're doing right now.
You don't realize that there are people who stand for things of value, like honor. You much prefer to believe that everybody has an angle and that Bush would sell his soul. Well, you're wrong. Your so full of conspiracy crap your eyes ooze. You may have bought the story, but you don't sell in Peoria.
That bomb could very easily be built in the next 12 months. Your "certainty" is nothing but a pack of wishful thinking. You would love for this to be all about oil because that's how you operate.
Well there's plenty of evidence out there to prove you don't know a damn thing. Of course people can believe some wily stock trader with a fictitious name and a lurid agenda or they can believe experts in the field.
nci.org
Let's start with this one:
nci.org
Iraq's Nuclear Threat
To the Editor:
A Nov. 25 front-page article says that "tracking Iraq's nuclear weapons sites is considered less complicated because of the radioactivity they emit and because the United Nations compiled a detailed picture of Iraq's program in the early 1990's."
Unfortunately, key technologies like centrifuges to enrich uranium for bombs release little detectable radiation. Fabrication of nonnuclear components for bombs, like high-explosive lenses, emits no radioactivity.
Before 1998, inspectors dismantled much of Iraq's bomb program. But significant issues remain unresolved: Iraq's bomb designs and nuclear-weapon components, for example, are still missing.
The greatest risk is Saddam Hussein's smuggling in bomb material stolen from civil or military programs, which the International Atomic Energy Agency concedes it has very little chance of detecting.
The only fail-safe approach is to halt production and use of plutonium and highly enriched uranium worldwide. Bomb-usable nuclear materials are too dangerous for civilian commerce.
STEVEN DOLLEY
Washington, Nov. 25, 2002
The writer is research director, Nuclear Control Institute.
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Oh, and Blix...the 24th choice. Don't make me laugh:
nci.org
Steve Kroft reports.
Leading the team is Hans Blix, an unflappable Swedish diplomat regarded as brilliant but cautious. The Bush Administration, and the rest of the world, will be watching his every move, as Blix confronts an Iraqi regime notorious for delaying, deceiving and lying to weapons inspectors.
He knows he is on the hot seat.
“We'll be correct and effective,” he says. Will he be aggressive?
“Aggressive is an American quality. You're aggressive in business, that's fine. Aggression is prohibited under U.N. charter. And as a European, I would rather use the word dynamic and effective, if you don't mind,” he says.
Semantics aside, Hans Blix wasn't anyone's first choice for the job of chief inspector. According to some reports, he was the 24th, after permanent members of the U.N. Security Council vetoed each candidate one by one until compromising on Blix, who had been the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency for 16 years.
Some said he was too much of a diplomat for the job. “Well, I prefer peaceful solutions to war-like solutions if I can have them. But I'm not a pacifist,” he says.
His team will be made up of 280 weapons inspectors from around the world, supported by helicopters, surveillance planes and state-of-the-art detection devices, some designed specifically for this mission.
He knows that it could all come down to one locked gate or one locked door, or one building to which he is denied access. That could touch off a war.
“We will report honestly and objectively from the field. But it's clear that we, too, have to exercise some common sense. If we have one flat tire among our escorts on the road and are delayed a quarter of an hour, it's one matter. But if you have four flat tires on the road to the same place, that's a different matter.
The U.N. Security Council has given the inspectors extraordinary powers. Under the terms of the resolution, Blix will have the authority to seal off entire compounds, to airlift Iraqi scientists and their families out of the country for interviews, and unimpeded, unconditional and unrestricted access to any site. Whether the Iraqis will cooperate is anyone's guess.
“Under the resolutions enforced by the Security Council, there are no sanctuaries and there are no places closed to us,” says Blix. “Even the so-called presidential sites, and there are quite a few - eight of them which were defined on the maps - we will now have immediate access.
Does he think the Iraqis know where he is going to go? “Some of the places, yes, but I don't think they will know all the places we'll go to,” Blix says with a chuckle.
But anticipating the inspectors' next move has become a national pastime in Iraq. Previous U.N. teams were penetrated by intelligence agents who may have compromised the inspections. Blix's group of international scientists and military experts were personally interviewed by his staff and chosen from thousands of applications.
Blix has confidence in the people he has hired. “But I can never have 100 percent guarantees that no one will not be someone who worked for a state. All I've said is that if I discover that ever, then I'll fire the person,” he says.
With that in mind, Blix says most of his team will be kept in the dark on operational details until the last possible moment.
Iraqis will not know either: “Most inspections are no-notice inspections. As you say, the inspectors tell you we go in this direction on this road and when they reach the target, they tell them, ‘This is the target we're going to visit.’”
But Tim McCarthy, a former U.N. weapons inspector who conducted nearly 100 inspections inside Iraq in the 1990s, says "no-notice" inspections hardly ever surprise the Iraqis because of their highly sophisticated intelligence network.
“They know who's defected from their country and where those people worked and those are sites that inspectors want to go see. They say ‘Hey, something is going on here.' They have the capability to listen to our conversations. You know, it's a high likelihood they will know where inspectors are going,” he says.
What about decoy teams? “There are techniques, but frankly, it's still their country. And the advantages really go to them. And it's a very significant advantage.”
In McCarthy's view, the real strength of this U.N. resolution is a provision forcing Iraq to provide an "accurate, full and complete declaration" of all its past and present weapons programs by Dec. 8. "False statements or omissions" could be grounds for war.
“It is very unlikely that they will find a weapon. They won't come back with the bomb in the basement. This will not happen. What they will come back with is a kind of body of evidence saying Iraq is lying,” he says. Then, he says, there may have to be another war.
But Iraq isn't the only one under pressure. In recent weeks, Blix has been told repeatedly by top U.S. officials - including President Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell - that they expect him to take a tough stand with Iraq. The U.S. has given him some possible sites, he says.
In Washington, Blix’s record on Iraq doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. As head of the IAEA from 1981 to 1997, his job was to monitor and prevent the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. But during his tenure, Iraq built a massive nuclear weapons program right under his nose.
Blix says he was not the only one: “The criticism has been that when I was at the IAEA, the IAEA did not discover what Iraq was doing in the '90s. And that is true. We did not. And this was a misery we shared with the CIA. And MI5, and even the Mossad. They also did not know at all. They had all the spies and the satellites.”
Yet Blix did have his own inspectors on the ground, sometimes in the very same compound where the Iraqis were enriching nuclear material for the bomb. But he says his team then did not have unrestricted access. They needed Iraqi approval to enter particular buildings.
“The one thing that we need to see happen is Hans Blix become a man of steel, become very hard nosed, not accept any kind of obfuscation or ambiguity,” says Paul Levanthal, the founder of the Nuclear Control Institute, which tracks the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. He's followed Blix's career for 20 years.
“The real question in my mind is whether Hans Blix, based on I think a rather flawed record when he was the head of the IAEA, both before and after the Gulf War, whether he really has the backbone to be confrontational, which is, I think, the first requirement for effective inspections is a willingness to be confrontational,” says Levanthal, who says he is skeptical.
But Blix says he can be confrontational when the situation demands.
According to Ken Pollack, that will happen. A former analyst with both the CIA and the National Security Council, Pollack says Iraq is still hiding weapons - a belief shared by the Bush administration. Pollack contends that Blix and his team have little chance of finding those weapons.
“We know that the Iraqis have taken very big portions of all of their weapons of mass destruction programs and put them on the road. The biological warfare program is the best example. Where all the evidence we have indicates that the Iraqis have taken small biological labs and put them in the back of recreational vehicles. And they are driving these things all around Iraq. And you're trying to figure out which of these Winnebago's actually has a biological warfare lab on the back of it. Or even where it is,” he says.
Pollack says that the U.S. government may not have given all its information to Blix, because it doesn’t want to reveal its best sources.
What is success in this mission? “Success certainly is to disarm Iraq. I agree with those who say that inspection is not the goal, it's disarmament that is the goal,” says Blix.
Blix will not say what he thinks the chances of success are. He thinks this time will be different, though. “They know that the consequences might be very serious this time. Now, you have a unanimous Security Council that demands all the Iraqis to cooperate. I think it's a very somber moment and I hope that this is taken to heart by the Iraqis.”
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Finally:
nci.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday, September 30, 2002 CONTACT: Steven Dolley
(202)-822-8444; nci@nci.org
“THERE THEY GO AGAIN”: IA.E.A. MISSTATES ITS RECORD
ON DISMANTLING SADDAM’S NUCLEAR-BOMB PROGRAM
Washington---The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) continues to misstate the degree of success it achieved on dismantling Saddam Hussein’s covert nuclear-bomb program during nuclear inspections in Iraq between 1991 and 1998, according to an analysis by the Nuclear Control Institute (NCI), a non-proliferation research and advocacy center.
“IAEA’s recent claims that they have ‘neutralized [Iraq’s] nuclear-weapon program’ and ‘destroyed all their key buildings and equipment’ related to weaponization are patently false, and the Agency’s own inspection reports prove it,” said Steven Dolley, NCI research director.
On September 26, IAEA challenged a statement by President Bush that the IAEA had concluded Iraq was six months away from acquiring nuclear weapons in 1998. An IAEA spokesman stated that no such IAEA report existed.[1] The Agency also took issue with the conclusion of a report by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), released earlier this month. The IISS report posited that if Iraq “were to obtain fissile material from abroad --- steal it or buy it in some way --- we certainly believe [Saddam] has the ability to put together a nuclear weapon very quickly, in a matter of months.”[2]
In response, IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky declared
I don’t know where they [IISS] have determined that Iraq has retained this much weaponization capability because when we left in December ’98 we had concluded that we had neutralized their nuclear-weapons program. We had confiscated their fissile material. We had destroyed all their key buildings and equipment.[3]
Additionally, on September 30 IAEA spokesperson Melissa Fleming claimed that, prior to the inspectors’ withdrawal in late 1998, IAEA had “uncovered Iraq’s secret nuclear program, and we dismantled it. We were successful last time. If we get unfettered access, we will be successful again.”[4]
“For IAEA to claim that they ‘neutralized’ Saddam’s nuclear weaponization capability is dangerously inaccurate, and muddies the waters of the Iraq debate,” said Dolley. “Since 1997, the Agency has operated under the assumption that Iraq could successfully fabricate a working nuclear bomb if they managed to acquire a sufficient amount of fissile material. The Agency’s latest statement correctly points out that no one outside Iraq knows the current status of Iraq’s nuclear-bomb program, in large part because there have been no inspections in nearly four years. But for IAEA to suggest that it completely eliminated Iraq’s weaponization capability prior to 1998 is irresponsible in the extreme. The Agency should recant this statement.”
Several Iraqi nuclear weapons facilities and much equipment were indeed dismantled or destroyed by U.N. inspectors between 1991 and 1998. However, substantial and significant issues about Iraq’s ability to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program remained unresolved when the inspectors left the country.
Dolley, citing IAEA’s own inspection reports as documentation, said: “Iraq has never surrendered to inspectors its two completed designs for a nuclear bomb, nuclear-bomb components such as explosive lenses and neutron initiators that it is known to have possessed, or almost any documentation of its efforts to enrich uranium to bomb-grade using gas centrifuges, devices which are small and readily concealed from reconnaissance.”[5]
Moreover, IAEA has previously conceded that Iraq’s weaponization R&D---small-scale technical research devoted to the design of a nuclear bomb’s components---is not readily detected by means of inspections. IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei stated in 1998 that “no matter how comprehensive the inspection, any country-wide verification process, in Iraq or anywhere else, has a degree of uncertainty that aims to verify the absence of readily concealable objects such as small amounts of nuclear material or weapons components.”[6]
The IAEA’s own guidelines for the safeguarding of highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium gives the conversion time for transforming these materials into weapons components as on the order of seven to ten days or one to three weeks, depending on the form the materials are in (metal, oxide or nitrate) when the materials are acquired by means of diversion or theft.[7] Thus, Iraq could be capable of producing a nuclear weapon in less than a month with sufficient diverted or stolen fissile material if it has managed to fabricate and conceal all of the non-nuclear components of a weapon.
IAEA’s recent statement that the Agency had “neutralized [Iraq’s] nuclear-weapons program” suggests that by 1998, IAEA had effectively eliminated Iraq’s ability to weaponize---that is, to manufacture and assemble the components needed for a working nuclear bomb, lacking only fissile material (plutonium or highly enriched uranium) to fuel it. This is simply not the case, and IAEA’s own previous findings directly contradict this claim. IAEA’s plans for ongoing monitoring in Iraq (discontinued in December 1998 when the inspectors left the country and were not allowed to return) were, as Director-General ElBaradei noted in June 1998, “predicated on the assumption that Iraq has the technical ability to design and construct a nuclear weapon and takes into account the large intellectual resource in Iraq in the corps of scientists and engineers who worked in Iraq's clandestine nuclear program.”[8]
The Agency’s own October 1997 review of its inspections in Iraq concluded that "Iraqi programme documentation records substantial progress in many important areas of nuclear weapon development, making it prudent to assume that Iraq has developed the capability to design and fabricate a basic fission weapon, based on implosion technology and fueled by highly enriched uranium."[9]
More information about Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program is available on NCI’s website “Saddam and the Bomb” at nci.org
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[1] Joseph Curl, “Agency Disavows Report on Iraq Arms,” Washington Times, September 27, 2002. President Bush does appear to be mistaken on this point. NCI knows of no IAEA report claiming that Iraq was within six months of the bomb in 1998. The Agency did conclude in October 1997 that as of 1991, prior to the Gulf War, Iraq was within a few years of acquiring the capability to enrich bomb quantities of uranium, using either electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS, or calutrons) or gas centrifuges. IAEA, Fourth Consolidated Report of the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency under Paragraph 16 of Security Council Resolution 1051 (1996), October 8, 1997, S/1997/779, p. 47. However, that IAEA estimate was based on Iraq’s nuclear assets prior to Operation Desert Storm and on subsequent weapons inspections, which together destroyed or dismantled Iraq’s known uranium-enrichment infrastructure.
[2] John Chipman, “IISS Strategic Dossier-Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Net Assessment,” IISS, September 9, 2002. Some media stories on the IISS report featured headlines that Iraq was “months away” from the bomb, an inaccurate interpretation of this finding, which was nothing new but rather a reiteration of what had been known for years about Iraq’s technical progress in nuclear bomb design. See Steven Dolley, “Iraq and the Bomb: The Nuclear Threat Continues,” Nuclear Control Institute, February 19, 1998, available online at nci.org; and “New Nuclear Inspections in Iraq: Key Issues,” Nuclear Control Institute Backgrounder, September 26, 2002, available at nci.org
[3] Quoted in Curl, “Agency Disavows Report on Iraq Arms,” op cit note 1.
[4] Quoted in William Kole, “Inspectors Seek Open Access in Iraq,” Associated Press, September 30, 2002.
[5] See “Iraq’s Nuclear Weapons Program: Unresolved Issues,” Nuclear Control Institute, May 12, 1998, available online at nci.org
[6] Mohamed ElBaradei, “Iraq’s Nuclear File: Still Open,” Washington Post, June 1, 1998, p. A17.
[7] IAEA, IAEA Safeguards Glossary, 1987 Edition, p. 23 & Table II, p. 24.
[8] Ibid.
[9] S/1997/779, pp. 61-62.
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To state that they cannot develop a nuclear weapon in a year is stupid or manipulative, or both. You don't know anything mish. You never did. Get real! |
