You Call That Evidence?

[furtherfield]

You Call That Evidence?

The Bush administration has begun to produce what it calls evidence to support its claim that Iraq is moving very near a nuclear weapon capability. But a story in Sunday's New York Times (September 8, 2002), especially as elaborated by administration officials on Sunday talk shows, actually suggests just the opposite-that Iraq is not as close as it was before the Gulf War.

In a front-page story, Times reporters Michael Gordon and Judith Miller write that they were told by administration officials that Iraq has been trying to buy specially designed aluminum tubes to be used to fabricate gas centrifuges in which to produce weapon-grade uranium.

How does that compare to what we know about the state of Iraq's nuclear program in 1991? 

After the Gulf War, U.N. Special Commission inspectors discovered that although Iraq had spent billions of dollars over nearly two decades, its efforts to produce weapon-grade uranium had basically come up empty. 

Iraq had been using two methods: One program involved building giant "calutrons," a clumsy technology the United States had abandoned in the 1940s. For decades that technology had been considered so primitive and inefficient that it was unlikely ever to be copied; everything anyone could want to know about it was available in the open literature. It's hard to say what an Iraqi success with this method would have meant, but in any case, the calutrons were destroyed.

http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2002/wo/0909rothstein.html
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