Report Says Iraqi Nukes Found in Disarray

[jburton]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&e=17&u=/ap/nuclear_agency_iraq

VIENNA, Austria - U.N. inspectors found Iraq (news - web sites)'s nuclear program in disarray and unlikely to be able to support an active effort to build weapons, the atomic agency chief said in a confidential report obtained Monday by The Associated Press.

snip

"In the areas of uranium acquisition, concentration and centrifuge enrichment, extensive field investigation and document analysis revealed no evidence that Iraq had resumed such activities," ElBaradei said in the report, made available to the AP by a diplomat.


"No indication of post-1991 weaponization activities was uncovered in Iraq," he said.



on edit-this is one of MANY stories on Yahoo Top Stories that are really looking bad for *

[Walt Starr]

1. Just rated that story a 5

It's now at 4.52

[gp]

2. Let's refresh our memory.

Transcript of Powell's U.N. presentation
Thursday, February 6, 2003 Posted: 8:08 AM EST (1308 GMT)

<snip>

Part 7: Nuclear weapons

Let me turn now to nuclear weapons. We have no indication that Saddam Hussein has ever abandoned his nuclear weapons program.

On the contrary, we have more than a decade of proof that he remains determined to acquire nuclear weapons.

To fully appreciate the challenge that we face today, remember that, in 1991, the inspectors searched Iraq's primary nuclear weapons facilities for the first time. And they found nothing to conclude that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program.

But based on defector information in May of 1991, Saddam Hussein's lie was exposed. In truth, Saddam Hussein had a massive clandestine nuclear weapons program that covered several different techniques to enrich uranium, including electromagnetic isotope separation, gas centrifuge, and gas diffusion. We estimate that this illicit program cost the Iraqis several billion dollars.

Nonetheless, Iraq continued to tell the IAEA that it had no nuclear weapons program. If Saddam had not been stopped, Iraq could have produced a nuclear bomb by 1993, years earlier than most worse-case assessments that had been made before the war.

</snip>

Full transcript about nuclear proliferation:
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/02/05/sprj.irq.powell.transcript.07/