Though President Bush didn't mention it in his speech yesterday rebutting critics of his administration's use of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, experts say that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled enough partially enriched uranium to produce at least one full-fledged nuclear bomb.
Commenting on Saddam's enriched uranium stash after the U.S. Energy Department removed it to Oak Ridge, Tenn., in June 2004, top physicist Ivan Oelrich told the Associated Press:
"[Saddam's] 1.95 tons of low-enriched uranium could be used to produce enough highly enriched uranium to make a single nuclear bomb."
Oelrich, a leading member of the Federation of American Scientists, is not alone in that assessment.
Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, told the New York Times that Saddam's partially enriched uranium "could have been further enriched to make it useful in a weapon."
After the U.S. removed Saddam's nuke fuel stockpile, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi confirmed that it posed a great danger to the region's security interests.
"These materials, which are potential weapons of mass murder, are not welcome in our country and their production is unacceptable," Allawi told Agence France Press.
Even Saddam's 500-ton un-enriched uranium stockpile, which he stored at the same nuclear weapons research facility where inspectors found his partially enriched stash, posed a potential threat.
In a March 2003 op-ed piece for London's Evening Standard, Norman Dombey, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Sussex, calculated that Saddam's yellowcake could have yielded a staggering nuclear arsenal.
You have a warehouse containing 500 tons of natural uranium," Dombey wrote. "You need 25 kilograms of U235 to build one weapon. How many nuclear weapons can you build?
"The answer is 142 [nuclear bombs]," he said.
Think what such a madman supplier could have done with that, farming out the material to other people, like Zaqawi, who came into the area? Think what he could have done if the UN sanctions would have been lifted, as they were going to be?
5PM update
WMD reader JD found the AP story this came from, evidently RepublicanVet cited a newsmax piece that used this AP story. Here is the AP story, judge what you will. I will make no editorial comments, just read th story and draw your own conclusions either way.
By H. Josef HebertAssociated Press In a secret
> operation, the United States last month removed from
> Iraq nearly two tons of uranium and hundreds of
> highly
> radioactive items that could have been used in a
> so-called dirty bomb, the Energy Department
> disclosed
> Tuesday.The nuclear material was secured from Iraq’s
> former nuclear research facility and airlifted out
> of
> the country to an undisclosed Energy Department
> laboratory for further analysis, the department said
> in a statement.Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham
> described the previously undisclosed operation,
> which
> was concluded June 23, as “a major achievement” in
> an
> attempt to “keep potentially dangerous nuclear
> material out of the hands of terrorists.”The haul
> included a “huge range” of radioactive items used
> for
> medical and industrial purposes, said Bryan Wilkes,
> a
> spokesman for the Energy Department’s National
> Nuclear
> Security Administration.Much of the material “was in
> powdered form, which is easily dispersed,” said
> Wilkes.The statement provided only scant details
> about
> the material taken from Iraq, but said it included
> “roughly 1,000 highly radioactive sources” that
> “could
> potentially be used in a radiological dispersal
> device,” or dirty bomb.Also ferried out of Iraq was
> 1.95 tons of low-enriched uranium, the department
> said.Wilkes said “a huge range of different
> isotopes”
> were secured in the joint Energy Department and
> Defense Department operation. They had been used in
> Iraq for a range of medical and industrial purposes,
> such as testing oil wells and pipelines.Uranium is
> not
> suitable for making a dirty bomb. But some of the
> other radioactive material — including cesium-137,
> colbalt-60 and strontium — could have been valuable
> to
> a terrorist seeking to fashion a terror weapon.Such
> a
> device would not trigger a nuclear explosion, but
> would use conventional explosives to spread
> radioactive debris. While few people would probably
> be
> killed or seriously affected by the radiation, such
> an
> explosion could cause panic, make a section of a
> city
> uninhabitable for some time and require cumbersome
> and
> expensive cleanup.Nuclear nonproliferation advocates
> said securing radioactive material is important all
> over the world.A recent study by researchers at the
> Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey
> Institute of International Studies concluded it is
> “all but certain” that some kind of dirty bomb will
> be
> set off by a terrorist group in the years ahead.
> There
> are just too many radioactive sources available
> across
> the globe, the report said.“This is something we
> should be doing not just in Iraq,” Ivan Oelrich, a
> physicist at the Federation of American Scientists,
> said when asked to comment on the Energy Department
> announcement.Oelrich hesitated to characterize the
> threat posed by the uranium and other radioactive
> material secured in the secret U.S. operation
> because
> few details were provided about the material. The
> Energy Department refused to say where the material
> was shipped.But Oelrich said it is widely believed
> that medical and industrial isotopes can be used in
> a
> dirty bomb.The low-enriched uranium taken from Iraq,
> if it is of the 3 percent to 5 percent level of
> enrichment common in fuel for commercial power
> reactors, could have been of value to a country
> developing enrichment technology.“It speeds up the
> process,” Oelrich said, adding that 1.95 tons of
> low-enriched uranium could be used to produce enough
> highly enriched uranium to make a single nuclear
> bomb.
