Saddam's Uranium

July 15, 2008
Saddam's Uranium
Posted by Warren Strobel
McClatchy Blog

Last week, the Iraqi government announced that it had sold 550 tons of natural uranium, a stockpile that dated from Saddam Hussein's regime, to a Canadian company.

Does this mean Saddam had WMD after all, as at least a few commentators are now maintaining?

Sigh. Let's go through this one ... more ... time.

These sorts of stories have popped up every now and then over the last few years. Remember the supposed truckloads of WMD that Saddam sent to Syria in the dying days of his regime? Then there was the report that about 300 munitions containing chemical weapons had been found in Iraq since Saddam's fall from power. Turns out that they dated from the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88, and had degraded so badly that they were useless.

Nothing has emerged to change the basic conclusion of U.S. weapons inspector David Kay, who led a post-invasion effort to find WMD in Iraq. As Kay famously said, "It turns out that we were all wrong."

No secret weapons caches have emerged. No Iraqi scientists have come forward to speak of advanced weapons programs. None of the trove of regime documents have detailed a WMD effort that posed a near-term threat to the United States and its allies.

So what of the 550 tons of uranium, which was in a raw form known as yellowcake? Well, the first thought that strikes us here at N&S is that if Saddam had all that raw uranium, why would he have been secretly negotiating to buy the exact same thing from Niger, as forged documents purported? One more reason to suspect the Niger caper from the start, something the U.S. government and European intelligence agencies failed to do.

Much more importantly, the 550 tons of uranium ore in question wasn't a secret. It was well-known that Iraq had a stored cache of the stuff at its Tuwaitha nuclear complex. Ever since the end of the 1991 Gulf War, the ore had been under the lock and key of the International Atomic Energy Agency. (Ironically, Tuwaitha was looted after the U.S. invasion, when the Bush administration failed to order American armed forces to secure it).

More importantly, uranium yellowcake is about as many steps away from a nuclear weapon as a block of marble is from Michelangelo's statue David.

You need to do a lot of STUFF to yellowcake to turn it into fissile material. Any nuclear scientists reading this are welcome to chime in, but it basically involves refining the ore, turning it into a gas, and then feeding that gas through a series of centrifuges to separate the particular isotope of uranium that you need. Get enough of that, and you have highly-enriched uranium. Then you can build a bomb.

What the Bush administration said before the invasion notwithstanding, Saddam was nowhere close to any of this. We'll explain this all again ... in a few months.