RE: Al-Qaida may have nuclear weapons

["Flood, John" <FloodJR@NV.DOE.GOV>]

Interesting discussion.  It's a little hard to se the comparison between

Munich in 1972 and the current threat - the stakes today bear no resemblance

to those of 1972.



I'm generally not in favor of political discussions like this in Radsafe,

but I'll violate my own rule this one time.



The UN inspection teams that criss-crossed Iraq after the Gulf War found

chemical weapons, consistent with the reported use of on Kurdish people in

Iraq.  These stocks were tagged by the inspectors.  Those inspectors also

found low grade uranium in quantity, the sort that would take years, perhaps

decades to turn into weapons-grade material. The Iraq locked out the

inspectors, and years passed.



When the inspections resumed, the inspectors went immediately to verify the

tagged materials and found none - all gone, no explanations given to this

day.  The uranium was still there.



Funny how known supplies of chemical weapons disappeared without a trace and

everyone seems to conclude that, because we haven't found them, they never

existed.  How convenient.



A imagine everyone's surprise when enrichment hardware designed for weapon

production was found in Iran!  No one seems to know how they got that stuff.

Eager to pursue the China-Pakistan-Libya link, Iran agreed easily.  But no

one has made any effort to determine if it came to Iran from Iraq.  There

was certainly no love lost between Iraq and Iran, but faced with an

overwhelming force rolling across his borders, Hussein undoubtedly would

have preferred to see another country have the stuff rather than the US find

it.  And Iran is the only other country out there that would have been

interested.



And by the way, the claim that the current administration has lied about all

this is amazingly incorrect.  No weapons found since we entered Iraq - how

many US (or other) governments have you lived under in your lifetime that

wouldn't have planted evident to vindicate the premise of the war?  Frankly,

we've been seeing a degree of honesty I don't recall seeing before.



It's also interesting to try to place in the same boat the use of atomic

weapons to force an end to a war started by the bomb-ee with using chemical

weapons on citizens of one's own country.



And frankly, Spain's rapid rejection of it's government and rush to pull out

of Iraq shows AQ that the tactic works in some cases, while 9/11 shows it

doesn't in others.  The only way they can tell where else it might work

requires further testing.  So expect further testing.



Personal opinions, all of them.  



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