CNN says some Iraqi scientist had a crucial piece of technology for making nuclear weapons buried in his backyard. However, it doesn't seem so cut and dry. First, it was buried in backyard. Can these sensitive instruments really be treated like that? I guess it can, but it seems odd to me. Anyway, apparently he had it there since '91, when Iraq had to stop its nuclear program. So, they did technically stop their nuclear program after all. They were "ready to re start it when the world wasn't looking," but they weren't doing anything at the moment, and I don't think the world would have stopped looking anytime soon.
What I wonder is, did everyone really forget about a piece of equipment that would have saved Iraq 100's of millions of dollars?
Experts said the documents and pieces Obeidi gave the United States were the critical information and parts to restart a nuclear weapons program, and would have saved Saddam's regime several years and as much as hundreds of millions of dollars for research.
I've actually heard this argument already. They argued that this isn't proof that Iraq was in violation, because they probably forgot it was there.
I don't even know how to answer that kind of logic. I know that it is inconceivable to me that I would forget where I hid expensive parts of a nuclear program. It doesn't pass the test of common sense.
(edited by Guru Zim on 25.6.03 2246) Willful ignorance of science is not commendable. Refusing to learn the difference between a credible source and a shill is criminally stupid.
I don't often hide things, but if I did hide something in the backyard, I would probably forget about it to.
Anyway, I've never heard anyone say they forgot where it was. Who said this and why? It seems to me, like I said before, that they hid it to use once nobody was looking, which was never going to happen in the first place.
I think this is just the tip of the iceburg. It demonstrates that Hussein did indeed have no problem hiding things with his scientists, in completely off the wall places.
So IF he did have WMDs in the days prior to the war, it is entirely likely that these things are also hidden in equally nondescript places.
And one thing is for sure, you can't dig up every single backyard in all of Iraq this fast to find them.
It must be an awfully small tip then. What was found was parts of a centrifuge used in creating nuclear weapons. IE, one very incomplete centrifuge. A nuclear weapons facility would use over five hundred of these things, plus they'd also use all other sorts of equipment. The International Atomic Energy Commission, furthermore, knew about the existence of this centrifuge since the mid-90s (when the scientist in question escaped Iraq) and dismissed it as being unimportant.
Once again - this is yet another case of blatant spin on things that aren't really threatening in the least being made to look like harbingers of doom, IE the "biological weapons trucks" that British intelligence and the US state department have both declared as non-weapon-making facilities, and incomplete ones at that.
So IF he did have WMDs in the days prior to the war, it is entirely likely that these things are also hidden in equally nondescript places.
Yes, because if you bury weapons, they don't degrade or break down and remain threatening forever.
I don't believe this is a smoking gun, rather, I think it may indicate that there is one to be found.
By its very definition, the tip of an iceburg IS small. Godking, I did not way that it was proof positive that there were weapons, and nor did I say that this find was paramount to a fully operational Nuke. I said it MAY show EVIDENCE of a pattern. This is not a spin, it is a cracked door. To spin this would be to dismiss it out of hand as "nothing," since the part itself was benevolent.
And yeah, if packaged right, you could hide weapons, and development programs for a long, long time buried in a scientist's back yard. A long time.
During World War II, the British army experimented with an explosive shell filled with anthrax spores. These experiments took place on an island off the coast of Scotland. Spores persisted in the environment for 36 years. A massive decontamination effort finally cleared the region in 1987.
So I would think that at least Anthrax could last buried in Iraq in good contaners for a while.