Nuke component found in Iraq

[kenyg]

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/...uge/index.html

Sounds like reason enough to attack a country.

[kenyg]

"It begins to tell us how huge our job is," Kay said. "Remember, his material was buried in a barrel behind his house in a rose garden. There's no way that that would have been discovered by normal international inspections. I couldn't have done it. My successors couldn't have done it."

the ones screaming "where are the weapons" are the ones who give Hussein to little credit. we being a superior country think we know and have everything figured out. We think with all the intelligence that we can gather we know everything. This is just the start of what is to come. The country is roughly the size of Texas and people expect us to everything NOW. they had 51 planes buried in the sands, that says a lot on what they have out there

I heard this saw this Breaking News on CNN a while back. I have a few comments:

1) The scientist who buried this stuff 12 years ago comes forth now. What was promised to him by the CIA? Money? Amnesty? US citizenship?

2) How come he waited for 3 months after the war to suddenly surface now when the noose around Bush's neck (figuratively speaking) is tightening?

3) How relevant are these components in the overall picture? Could they be for nuclear power generation also?

While I accept that it may well be for an aborted nuclear program, would this be relevant today? The scientist claims to have buried it 12 years ago. Does this imply that their nuclear program was in hybernation for 12 years? Doesn't this technology change? Is it possible to use this today?

Or is it possible that Saddam had, in fact, stopped all such programs and said so. Only to have no one believe him. These are relevant questions, in my view, and need answers before one can jump to conclusions.

Because remember it may just be yet another clumsy CIA step to protect itself and the President.

I just can't help but wonder whether Bush-Rumsfeld had a secret meeting with Tenet and threatened him to find something. Anything.

Just some thoughts.

[Toadman]

1) The scientist who buried this stuff 12 years ago comes forth now. What was promised to him by the CIA? Money? Amnesty? US citizenship?

He and his family gets to live now that Saddam is no longer in power. Anything else is a perk.

2) How come he waited for 3 months after the war to suddenly surface now when the noose around Bush's neck (figuratively speaking) is tightening?

Who knows? Bush's "noose" is only tightening in the int'l community and liberal media.

3) How relevant are these components in the overall picture? Could they be for nuclear power generation also?

Read up on how U-235 is converted to Plutonium and you'll have your answer to why a centrifuge.

Shahani, if you are so philosophically against Bush, US Foreign Policy and the Military, how can you live with yourself here selling out to your true beliefs? It's hypocritical. (No flame, just want an honest answer).

[Toddly]

Well I believe him, Sadaam was trying to build a bomb but I don't think they ever succeeded. I don't know what this discovery says about the future so I won't speculate. Could someone tell me who they are refering to when they say "liberal media".

Originally posted by Toadman
Shahani, if you are so philosophically against Bush, US Foreign Policy and the Military, how can you live with yourself here selling out to your true beliefs? It's hypocritical. (No flame, just want an honest answer).

1) Big assumption there. I am in fact not selling out to the corrupt and immoral Administration. I am voicing my concerns and opinions.

2) Probably half the people in this country would agree with me. They are, like me, biding time till Bush and his mob is thrown out.

3) I am not so philosophically against Bush. I am against any immoral, corrupt, and unethical regime. Clinton's was no better and I am against that regime too.

I don't understand how you infer what you say. Should people just have two options in a professed democracy:

1) Shut up and agree to all the crap the President gives out.

2) Else move to Iraq or Mongolia.

Is it sensible for you to suggest this? Don't you think this kind of thinking will point towards totalitarian regimes like Saddam's.

Just some thoughts. I figure your intolerance of any opinions/positions contrary to your own is driving you towards extreme positions of asking people to leave the country or shut up.

I don't normally address individual members and limit myself to addressing issues but in this case I strongly suggest deep introspection into your psyche over the weekend.

Perhaps it is you who should leave and settle in Iraq or similiar country more in tune with your inflexible attitude.

[Epidemic]

The most important part of this discovery is that it confirms what I have said. we have searched 235 known and suspected wmd sites and we have exhausted our search of government facillities.

Of course saddam had 12 years to find alternate facillities such as rose gardens and 26,000,000 other peoples houses, not to mention Millions of square miles of sand through out the country.

now I do not know if he had an active or even paused WMD program at the time of the last inspections. But it does prove that the sky is the limit for hiding materials. IMO it also proves that if the sanctions were ever lifted that there always would have been a threat of resumption.

Regarding the nuclear program I still remember in the early days of inspection an iraqi scientists house being raided and documentation regarding the development of nukes were found but that story faded away. Couple that with a centerfuge buried in the rose garden and tubes intercepted from germany and you have a ready made upgrade to their nuclear program.

Couple that with some mobile labs "for making hydrogen for weather experiments" yeah right burried in the desert, and you have ready made WMD program again.

Perhaps there was a WMD program perhaps not, alls I can say is time will tell who has egg on their face.

[Theophylact]

It's not a "nuke component". It's a component of an isotope separation facility. You need lots of gas centrifuges to separate significant amounts of U-235 from the 99.3% U-238 it's found with in natural uranium.

You want to say that Saddam Hussein at one time -- perhaps even recently -- was trying to assemble the hardware to enrich uranium, fine. We knew that. The article makes it clear, though, that this guy stowed those parts away twelve years ago.

It's very easy to make a nuke if you have U-235, but it's hard to develop an enrichment program. It's much easier to extract plutonium from spent reactor fuel as North Korea has done, but rather harder (though, unfortunately, not nearly hard enough) to convert it into a bomb.

The Israelis destroyed Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981; that meant they had to go a much harder route. We stopped that in 1991, and UN inspectors hindered it thereafter; the best evidence is that even after the inspectors were kicked out, Iraq was several years away from a successful enrichment facility. Pressure on Iraq to readmit inspectors put an end even to that.