Saturday, April 26, 2003

Missing Nukes?!
One of my biggest fears about the war in Iraq was that if in fact they had WMD's, we would stand more of a chance that they would be distributed (or used) in the "fog of war."

I thought of it like this - Iraq was a glass jar full of sand, with super balls (those little rubber balls you get from a gum-ball dispenser that bounce like crazy) as the WMDs mixed within it. The jar was on a table surrounded by all sorts of people, including terrorists, rogue nations, other assorted villians and the allied countries. Saddam, while the weapons inspection program was ongoing, kept the glass jar intact. But the war smashed the jar open, and the super balls went all over the place. The U.S. and the U.K. were suppose to try to catch all the super balls (additional allies might have been good to have around the table) but it was never going to be easy. So now the jar is broken, and as of now, none of the super balls have been found!!

The following is from today's Washington Post, which shows that some of Iraq's nuclear material is now missing - U.S. Has Not Inspected Iraqi Nuclear Facility :

Defense officials acknowledge that the U.S. government has no idea whether any of Tuwaitha's potentially deadly contents have been stolen, because it has not dispatched investigators to appraise the site. What it does know, according to officials at the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command, is that the sprawling campus, 11 miles south of Baghdad, lay unguarded for days and that looters made their way inside.
...
"It's extremely surprising," said Corey Hinderstein, deputy director of the Institute for Science and International Security, when told that U.S. nuclear experts had not yet been to Tuwaitha. "I would have hoped that they would try to assess as quickly as possible whether the site had been breached. If there is radiological material on the loose in Iraq, with the chance that it may be transferred across borders, it would be extremely important to know that [in order] to prevent it from crossing a border or being transferred to a terrorist or another state."

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