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

To: Bilow who wrote (124102)	1/31/2004 11:15:01 PM
From: Sig	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<<<None of the war heads responded to my comment. The reason? Simple. None of them knows the slightest thing about (a) centrifuges, (b) aluminum tubes, (c) rockets, or (d) manufacturing. >>> Ya, vell, my occupation for many years vas as a Gherman vrocket scientist, where i vas in command of the hexperimental analysis of der Atlas vrocket progam at Nort Hamerican Aviation at Santa Susana . I also vwrote the Qualification Report for the AF on the liquid fueled 120-65 vroket and worked with Dieter Hutzel who vas one of Von Brauns people. Ve did not use no centrifuges for dat vrok. But der centrifuges for isotope separation are far different than the ones you showed. They have to run for years without stopping and are criticaly balanced so the bearings do not fail because they contain deadly materials being separated and once started nobody vants to mess with the mechanisms. So the best tubes are none too good A tube used for a rocket requires consistent material of high strength, but distortion or the thickness tolerance is not so critical as with a centrifuge. Sig

To: Bilow who wrote (124102)	2/1/2004 1:22:11 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

David Kay says that Iraq had lots of weapons programs, including a nuclear program. What the CIA missed, was that Saddam Hussein was off his rocker and supervising the programs personally, so the scientists all sold him a bill of goods to get the money: From interviews with Iraqi scientists and other sources, he said, his team learned that sometime around 1997 and 1998, Iraq plunged into what he called a "vortex of corruption," when government activities began to spin out of control because an increasingly isolated and fantasy-riven Saddam Hussein had insisted on personally authorizing major projects without input from others. After the onset of this "dark ages," Dr. Kay said, Iraqi scientists realized they could go directly to Mr. Hussein and present fanciful plans for weapons programs, and receive approval and large amounts of money. Whatever was left of an effective weapons capability, he said, was largely subsumed into corrupt money-raising schemes by scientists skilled in the arts of lying and surviving in a fevered police state. "The whole thing shifted from directed programs to a corrupted process," Dr. Kay said. "The regime was no longer in control; it was like a death spiral. Saddam was self-directing projects that were not vetted by anyone else. The scientists were able to fake programs." In interviews after he was captured, Tariq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister, told Dr. Kay that Mr. Hussein had become increasingly divorced from reality during the last two years of his rule. Mr. Hussein would send Mr. Aziz manuscripts of novels he was writing, even as the American-led coalition was gearing up for war, Dr. Kay said. nytimes.com Lots of weapons programs. Few weapons produced. But Saddam believed he had the weapons.