Does anyone care anymore?
Oh, those weapons of mass destruction:
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.
July 10th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Saddam only had it because it looked good mulched around his roses.
July 10th, 2008 at 10:46 am
What exactly does the oxymoronic ‘concentrated natural uranium’ mean?
July 10th, 2008 at 11:43 am
“A CIA officer, Valerie Plame, claimed her identity was leaked to journalists to retaliate against her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, who wrote that he had found no evidence to support assertions that Iraq tried to buy additional yellowcake from Niger.
A federal investigation led to the conviction of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.”
How in the hell is this even remotely related to the rest of the story. God how I hate CNN.
July 10th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
“concentrated natural uranium” is missing the word “ore”.
July 10th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
what weapons? yellowcake is not a weapon. it can’t even be used as reactor fuel, and when was the last time Iraq had a nuclear reactor…?
July 10th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Yes, and gun powder isn’t a weapon either.
July 10th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
Yellowcake’s useless as a reactor fuel, but it’s pretty much the first stage to any system of refinement. The tech to refine uranium is pretty much open knowledge at this point, and it’s also something we we already found parts to. Iraq had the damned things in 1991, and they’re not exactly difficult to duplicate.
That said, that’s not proof alone that this stuff was going to turn into a nuclear weapon, whether detonation or radiological. The stuff was known about, and under United Nations seal. Those seals can be faked, of course, or broken after Iraq’s bribery paid off.
Yellowcake is an intermediate step involved when processing uranium ores. It has more uranium than what forms naturally usually does, but usually has no greater concentration of a given isotope.
July 10th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
I know what yellowcake is, I just wasn’t sure if the journalist does. ‘natural’ implies that the uranium in question was unprocessed, which is directly contradicted by the claim that it was ‘concentrated’.
What exactly was on that freighter? Raw uranium ore? Partially enriched uranium? Some other form of uranium?
July 10th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
SH paid a lot to get that stuff probably; even though his nuke program was defunct and abandoned after Gulf War The First, he probably wasn’t going to just through the stuff down the garbage disposal.
That the stuff existed is probably not going to save the bacon of the “he’s gonna nuke us so we gotta attack him” crowd.
July 10th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
So he did have it. And a lot of it. One hell of a lot of it.
But that still doesn’t prove he was a bad man, now does it? Maybe he was going to give it to less fortunate people.
Can you really say Saddam was that bad? I understand he read to children.
July 10th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
no, not a hell of a lot of it really. remember, this isn’t uranium metal, much less enriched uranium suitable for reactor fuel; once you up-process it to be useful for much of anything, you won’t have five hundred metric tons anymore. how much you’ll have will depend on what the end product of your processing is, exactly, and therefore on what you meant to use it for.
whatever it was meant to be used for obviously didn’t get very far along. plain yellowcake, with no further refining done to it? those centrifuges would have been at least a few more steps down the line, but this junk didn’t even start down the line towards them? that’s the “unicorns will feed us pie in the sky if we scrape together enough pennies” of nuclear programs, right there.
no, this actually doesn’t prove that Saddam was a bad man. (we wouldn’t need yellowcake for that, anyway.) it proves he wanted to run a nuclear program of some kind at some point in time, but we already knew that. he had a reactor most of the way built at one point, remember? ok, so this stuff (probably — how old’s it, anyways?) wasn’t meant for Osirak, but whatever it was meant for, it didn’t get anywhere. we needed to start a war for this… why, exactly?
July 10th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Could be packed around conventional explosives to make a “dirty bomb” not real dangerous in and of itself but the scattered cake would read “hot’ and guess what the panic would be like if one went off in a major city!
July 10th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
shut up nonman. Jesus you’re a dense prick.;
July 10th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
I don’t think there’d be much panic beyond a day or two. It’s not exactly super radioactive stuff in that form from what I gather. We used to slather it on dinnerware to make it a pretty orange color.
As long as you don’t eat the yellow stuff on the ground, or roll around in it, you should be fine. Pretty much the same rule we all abode by when we were kids and there was snow on the ground.
Easy there. Save your strength. The Special Olympics are coming up.
July 11th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
The wet dream continues…
you link to the story saying “Oh, those weapons of mass destruction” yet forgot to quote the following passages:
So to recap, these were known and secured by the UN, not capable of even being in a dirty bomb and are pre-1991.
July 12th, 2008 at 4:57 am
To be qualified for the Special Olympics I seem to be in the proper company.
July 12th, 2008 at 8:46 am
Manish, why are you so excited over the fact that this yellowcake was pre-1991? So were all the WMD we thought Saddam still had! Are you still fixated on the fact that President Bush pointed out that Saddam had attempted to purchase uranium more recently from Niger? If so, perhaps I should remind you that attempt != succeed.
July 12th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Xrlq, the point is that this was not a startling discovery, we knew about this site prior to the invasion, and it was not evidence of an active WMD program, and was not a threat to us:
Furthermore, the IAEA had inspected the site several times before the Iraq War began in 2003 and nothing had been tampered with, and no programs restarted. But in a stunning lack of planning by the administration, the site was not immediately secured and was looted, like everything else.
But no, this is not shocking revelation. Nobody said Iraq never had any nuclear programs, what was said was that he had not restarted production of nuclear weapons, that he had no active programs when we invaded, and was not a threat to us. That assessment was, and remains, correct.
Tuwaitha was not a smoking gun.