Let’s jump in the way back machine with Mr. Peabody and Sherman
Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990’s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.
At the time, it was reported that it was 1.8 metric tons of yellow cake, and 500 tons of non weapons grade uranium.
And today
The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program – a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium – reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.
The removal of 550 metric tons of “yellowcake” – the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment – was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam’s nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.
Wait, wait: I thought Saddam had no WMD? WTF?
protein wisdom: Now, before you dull, neocon chickenhawk dupes (whose gullibility encouraged smarter and more discriminating Dem congresspeople to set aside their concerns and their principles and vote us overwhelmingly into a fake war based on the lying lies of lying liars who lied) get to feeling all vindicatey, please note that yellowcake itself — even 550 metric tons of the stuff — is not, without further enrichment, capable of causing anything more than a panic. And Saddam was far too busy writing romance novels and terrorizing Kurds and Marsh Arabs to even dream about further enriching the stuff.
Pandagon (which still has the racist header) says it don’t mean nothing. Why can’t liberals just lose gracefully?
Don Surber: AP: President Bush was right about Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of nuclear weaponry.
Q and O: ….has been safely removed from Iraq – you know, the stuff he supposedly didn’t have and had no interest in acquiring?
Neptunus Lex: Rubbish, of course. Meaningless trivia masquerading as “newsâ€, and only of value to the poor, undereducated and easily led. Who are even now clinging to their religion and guns. Bitterly. Because as everyone who is anyone now knows, there had never been any risk of anything whatsoever untoward coming out of Iraq. Never had been. Saddam only flew kites – secular kites – on workdays, enjoyed spending his evenings puttering about the kitchen and cuddled with puppies on weekends.
This is old material. But you know there is a big difference between yellocake and bomb grade material. IT was also well documented that Saddam’s enrichment program had been shut down in the 1990’s. But wasn’t that one of Bush’s excuses, lies that Saddam was going to Niger to get MORE yellowcake. Your claim that he was less than a year from getting a bomb is hardly a fact.
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Everyone has always known about this yellowcake. UN inspectors had it catalogued. How can you actually try to claim that this is some new revelation, or tells us anything we didnt know before. Are you really THAT uninformed, or are you playing some dishonest game?
ANd WMD??? Do you have the slightest clue as to what yellowcake is, and the distance one must go to get from yellowcake to a weapon?
This post should be quite the embarrassment. It actually strengthens the caes of the other side, since it shows the war supporters to be either totally clueless or totally dishonest.
Teach it takes a lot more than yellowcake to make an atomic bomb. Iran a country 4 times as big and rich as Iraq is still YEARS away it takes an incredibly large infrastructure thousands and thousands of centrifuges among other items. Saying that Saddam had WMD is stupid, no one believes it.
Yes, how dare anyone bring up old news… nothing to see here, move along.
This is the equivalent to saying I have constructed a bomb at my house, but since I have yet to manufacture the detonator, there is no problem.
So the UN knew about this material, and did nothing about it, leaving it in tact for Saddam to use at a later date. Now I’m not saying that this proves Iraq had WMDs, but they had the material used to manufacture them. If they weren’t planning on re-visiting the issue why keep it around, and more importantly, if the the UN knew about it, why was Iraq allowed to keep it?
How dare anyone ask that question.
Saddam had unprocessed yellowcake, not WMDs.
Mortimer, it is not my claim, that excerpt came from the NY Times.
Keep moving those goal posts, Joe. If you read the 2003 SOTU, you will see it is about denying Saddam his programs, of which nuclear was one of them. But, I guess, unless the bomb is actually going off, it doesn’t count, eh?
There is no winning with the lefties, MBP. They will change their position to a more nuanced one to avoid saying “oh, shit, he actually had some of the material we were worried about.”
Define wmd, Silke. Can you not create weapons out of yellow cake? It is the primary type for making weapons. Most of it came from the weapons design plant that the Israeli’s blew to hell. Does it have to be actually going off to count?
Teach you just don’t get it about yellowcake. It makes about as much sense to say that steel can be used to make atomic weapons. No you can not create atomic weapons out of yellowcake. You also need an incredibly large infrastructure none of which has ever been discovered. Saddam would have needed at least as much and probably twice as much time as the Iranians and they are still no where near close. And they also had the plans something which Saddam never had as Pakistan chose to sell them to his mortal enemies the iranians
Teach, one potential component of a weapon does not make it a weapon. I guess by that definition Niger also has WMDs, right?
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I have some castor oil in my kitchen. Better send some bombers to end my chemical weapons programme!