Joe Wilson had just one nightmare, and yellowcake was its name-o:
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. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.
Rubbish, of course. Meaningless trivia masquerading as “news”, and only of value to the poor, undereducated and easily led. Who are even now clinging to their religion and guns. Bitterly. Because as everyone who is anyone now knows, there had never been any risk of anything whatsoever untoward coming out of Iraq. Never had been. Saddam only flew kites – secular kites – on workdays, enjoyed spending his evenings puttering about the kitchen and cuddled with puppies on weekends.
The Middle East would have continued to be a veritable Eden of placid tranquility that it always had been, had not W. blundered in wearing muddy cowboy boots and made a mess of everything. Because after all, where were the ICBMS on egg timers that we were practically promised would be found pointing at Washington, New York and Los Angeles, eh? Without which there never would have been an “imminent” threat, even if that word was never actually used by anyone.
Eh?
Jeff Goldstein’s in a fine fettle over this, as you might well imagine. Poor, deluded neocon. Thinks it means something. When everyone who as any sense knows that the 550 tons of Saddamite yellowcake was intended for purely peaceful purposes.
Garden fertilizer, probably. Now lets talk about something else.
I keep hitting the refresh button to see if Ff11 has anything else to say…my finger is tired
(sorry Lex, couldn’t resist)
At a barbeque last night, I enjoyed the steak and Puget Sound oysters on the barby! Then, I come home to read of yet another barbeque … ff11 I’ve not heard the review, but the I think it to be a lot like burned ox-tail, from the smell of it.
Feel the POWER. The UN, IAEA, et al… draw back in amazement! One should shudder at the mere thought of such world groups come to call at your door. Sanctions? Woe is me, the offending party cries. Not!
Yellowcake… old? new? Does it really make one’s weapon potential less or better? Not!
So then we have the rogue. He says “Nay” to all the world powers as he plies them, from behind the curtain, with oil and dollars. However, not so much that he can’t have his gold plated plumbing.
Why, then, would any sane person reason that he’s okay with the bad actor having such potential weapon making material? “Let him have it”, you say ff11, “it’s okay… it’s been ‘contained’ by the world and its acronymn authorities.
So now, we know it was factually there as Canada says we’ll take the cake. ff11 says it’s old, contained, years away from growing the glow.
So… ff11, knowing it’s real, how can you say it doesn’t matter. Potential IS potential, after all and combined with the intent of a raging bull. What?
If so, you should have asked that its new home to be in your own backyard. You know… safe, contained, as it is, old or new.
PS: What XBradTC said… DITTO.
Skippy: Very cool! I love it!!!
@Big D
I hadn’t heard of the 500 chemical weapons you mentioned. I did a bit of Googling and found several articles. It seems they were discounted because they were basically inactive, and probably forgotten about by Saddam’s regime. See the last paragraph of this WaPo article.
Too bad, that would’ve been an interesting tidbit for future debates. But it doesn’t seem like they shells really qualified.
(pssst, the LAST step in the process is “fill the shell body with the nasty chemical (that way you don’t have the corrosion problems of storing filled shells)) (and that way they don’t look “active”)
(p.s. don’t do it until right before you’re really really ready to actually fire them)
No one is disputing that Saddam Hussein had WMD at one point in time. But i re-iterate. Degraded former WMD are not WMD.
Drew C, I will reply to your post, since you actually made a point worth responding to while you were rambling. I’m not debating the effectiveness of the explosives in the shell. I have no doubt that they had degraded somewhat, just as surely as they would not be considered a WMD if they had just rolled off the assembly line. The main issue here is the Sarin gas. It was released. Soldiers were exposed to it at point blank. And they were “slightly injured”?
The point is WMD means something.
A weapon of mass destruction (WMD) is a weapon which can kill large numbers of humans and/or cause great damage to man-made structures (e.g. buildings), natural structures (e.g. mountains) or the biosphere in general.
No matter how many pieces of once lethal equipment you come across, you don’t have any WMD if it can’t cause significant damage or harm.
You can fill your garage with a ton of prime steak, but you won’t have any steak there if you go back for it in a year.
The fact remains that to date, we don’t have a single example of an actual WMD found in Iraq after the war.
Does that mean that it’s utterly impossible that there is still a shell somewhere in Iraq unaccounted for that may qualify?
Certainly not
Does it mean that it is extremely unlikely that Saddam Hussein had a significant supply of such shells when we went in?
It most certainly does
And regarding IAEA seals, they worked to contain the Uranium for over 20 years. Then it was under our control for a few months and villagers were dumping the stuff out to loot the drums, so you will have to excuse me for not having your level of paranoia against the IAEA.
WTFF11?
Oh, Bill, don’t try to make real world sense of it. It’s just that every thing we now know we should have always known. Because.
Saddam’s Iraq was some great geopolitical Schrodinger’s Cat, wherein he simultaneously had – and did not have – stockpiles of WMD until the moment the observer actually opened the box.
And the puppies. Don’t forget the puppies. And the secular kites.
I’ve always wondered just how many Kurds Saddam had killed with the WMD he didn’t have. I’m sure finding the buried Mig-25’s wasn’t much of a challenge for the guys with the metal detectors, but WMD might be a bit of a different story.
Gotta tell ya, Lex, that no flightsuit thing is gonna take a bit of getting used to. Maybe you could have started us out with shirt, tie…and flight jacket. Glad to see the transition’s working for you!
I started this last night (a long night of on-call support tech with the phone in one hand, one monitor on the employee with problems and the other reading here). I feel better now, and can offer Lex the advice that now that his retirement is fairly secure do not go salaried and shun anything that makes you carry a pager unless those hours are compensated.
A man can lose a week for nothing gained being at the beck and call of others. Better to enjoy your kids growing up, or be able to take that second job.
Back to yellowcake.
Something we were taught in engineering school is Do The Math. 550 tons of Yellowcake. Yellowcake which is 60%-80% uranium. Uranium which is 0.72% of the fissile variety, the U-235 variant you’ve all heard so much about. U-238 doesn’t do much, kind of sits there, they used it to make those orange dining sets you saw back in the 70’s. Kind of a neon orange. Ugly. Went well with the bell bottoms.
U-235 is fissile. Shoot a slow neutron into it and it splits, shoots out a few more neutrons. Chain reaction.
So, let’s do some math. According to history it takes about 25kg, or 60lbs, of U-235 to make a little physics package. We have 550 tons of yellowcake * 2000lbs/ton * a low-end guess of 0.60 uranium/yellowcake * 0.007% U-235 in the end product.
Let’s see, add the 1 carry the four that comes out to about 4600lbs of U-235. You know, the fissile stuff. The stuff that goes boom.
4600lbs is a lot more than the 60lbs needed for a dirty bomb made using 1940’s machine tools and technology. You might say he was intending to build fuel rods for a reactor, but the French will sell him fuel rods and Westinghouse and GE are more than willing to sell him a reactor, seems like he could buy the whole thing wholesale rather than start from scratch. Save a bit for those bathroom faucets and gold-plated assault rifles, it would.
Some might wonder why we were worried about this yellowcake. Well, one might look at history for a guide. The yellowcake could give up material for (4600/60 = 77) low-yield weapons. Low-yield being a relative term,, Hiroshima only taking about 20KTons to utterly destroy.
Then there’s the high-tech part of this. The Manhatten Project wasn’t all that high-tech. It used 1940’s machine tools and a spread-out refining process to make the uranium. Think you can spot uranium refinement and enrichment by UN inspectors with certainty? The Manhatten project used labs across the nation, each trying a different method. The Ames Lab at Iowa State University I saw back in the mid-80’s, it was churning out U-235 in the basement and thousands of students above had no idea. Heck, we can’t find and shut down meth labs in Missouri, what makes us think we can stop enrichment labs in Mesopotamia?
Final point, for those who think this is small potatoes. The nuclear genie is out of the bottle. A megaton-plus blast still takes a lot of machining, precise explosives, timers that operate to the nanosecond. Because when you’re trying to do the fusion bomb it has to be precise.
The Hiroshima bomb, a fission version, didn’t take that much. It was only 20 kilotons, used only uranium, and being of the rifle design only perhaps 15% of the U-235 went critical. It was in fact the first dirty bomb. Not much to get excited about, only 20 Ktons, lots of Uranium left over to blow around and get in your lungs where it’ll cause cancers.
Kind of like being shot with a .22 — It didn’t cause a lot of damage but you’ve still been shot.
Yeah, the USA did this in the 1940’s. Somebody might have looked at all that yellowcake, looked at Saddam, and thought it could be possible. Which is kind of what we’re paying them to do, after all.
Scoff all you want about old Sarin gas in artillery shells, scoff even more about being able to walk through certain buildings to look around and not through others, he had the material and he had the talent available. The bomb used on Hiroshima wasn’t tested first — it was that certain to go boom.
Is one prudent or paranoid in removing the threat before 20Ktons of blast and 50lbs of U-235 are blown into the air for later cancer deaths?
Hey, all I know is I’m glad I get to do weeks on-call without sleep rather than make these decisions.
– Max
A) Sarin: it’s SOLE use is as a nerve agent;
2) nerve agents prohibited under the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gasses, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, signed in June 1925;
III. that particular protocol being additionally subscribed to by the nation of Iraq in yet another international conference in January 1989;
iv. under UN resolution 687 (April 1991) (the resolution wherein the coinage “weapon of mass destruction” originated), Sarin being subject to the clause that specifically called for the unconditional destruction, removal, or rendering harmless (under international supervision) of “All chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities;…”;
Epsilon: notwithstanding that Sarin (in its final form) does degrade over a fairly short time, but that stabilizers are generally used to extend it, and that its more common application would be in a binary round (designed with the precursors both contained in the same shell (to be mixed in flight (shelf life 5+ years)));
F. the preferred employment would be in a barrage of multiple shells;
VII: the idiot who rigged a single round for ground roadside detonation may not have realized what he was playing with, and failed to employ it in its optimal manner for causing mass destruction;
the fact remaining: SARIN (a weapon of mass destruction) was there.
I’m touched by how many people claim to be concerned about Kurds after Saddam didn’t have WMD and was no longer killing them. I wonder how many of you were concerned about Kurds when we were still supporting Saddam Hussein. You know … while he was busy killing them!
Max
To make even a dirty bomb, you have to convert the Uranium to Uranium hexafluoride. Then you have to gassify it. Then you have to run it through those chains of centrifuges that are so difficult to build, run, and maintain to >90% purity!!!
How many of those components did Iraq have? That would be none.
How many tons of the 550 was converted to UF6, or gassified, or enriched over the course of the 20 years?
That would be none.
How much of a case do you have?
That would be none.
Iraq did not have the equipment, or technology, or expertise, or the means to do this. Could they have conceivably developed it given enough decades if every fail-safe that had not failed in decades simultaneously stopped working?
Conceivably yes.
Would they use it if they did?
Saddam Hussein was a mad man, but he wasn’t stupid. The era when we slapped him on the back as he was carrying out atrocities was over. He would not for the exact same reason he didn’t use chemical or biological weapons on our troops during the first gulf war, when he still had them.
Self preservation.
Now on to Sarin
You are entirely missing the point. Yes everything you stated is common knowledge. But there is certainly no evidence that any of what we have come across was manufactured after 1991. What we appear to have found are the remnants of pre-war shells that have been rendered harmless (not under UN supervision).
Now Saddam Hussein did interfere with inspectors and for a time even expelled them from the country. But he did allow them to re-enter under pressure and we know that the UN was busily removing the remnants of what had once been Saddam Hussein’s WMD program.
And finally for the idiot who rigged up the roadside bomb. True there wouldn’t be a barrage of shells for maximum mass destruction. It caused “minor injuries” two two individuals at point blank range. A BB gun could do worse.
Another fact: SARIN is a weapon of mass destruction. SARIN rendered inactive, is not.
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did you miss the bit about degradation and shelf life?
if it is Sarin today, then it became Sarin not more than about 5 years ago (IF it was a result of being in a binary round w/pure precursors, stored under optimal conditions); or (IF was “ready made”) than it became Sarin much more recently than 5 years ago.
let’s see now: 1991 + 5 = (help me on this) not quite 2003.
so, IF Sarin is present in 2003, hmm, perhaps, maybe, just possibly, it came into existence sometime after the magical get well happy days of 1991.
perhaps the reports in July 1996 that Iraq was assessed to possess Sarin stockages with stability projected thru at least March 1997 were just so much hooey.
“Sarin rendered inactive” is harmless sodium salts.
“Sarin itself” is what they found.
ps: a drop of Sarin can kill a 100kg adult. a BB gun pointed at your ear drum can do a lot of damage.
ff11 (and all): upon re-reading, i realize that my closing sentence regarding BB guns and ear drums could be misconstrued. it is used here solely in the context of a counter-point to the earlier comment regarding a BB gun theoretically being more dangerous than degraded Sarin…
it was specifically not intended to postulate anything regarding ff11’s own personal ear drums.
ff11, one doesn’t need to use centrifuges. They are but one method, though the quickest. Gaseous diffusion, thermal diffusion, electromagnetic isotope separation, all were used nearly 70 years ago. Today there are numerous other techniques, we being a bit more knowledgable about chemistry these days.
Point is, the technology isn’t a hurdle to a nation-state, nor is keeping it a secret as we’ve proved in the past.
None of which proves Saddam did have a program to make up a nuke, but one must admit he had the material and the capability to do so.
Which was, I believe, the original claim.
– Max
One of the problems here is that so many (uninformed) people thought that because Ambassador Wilson said he found no evidence that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake from Niger between 1999 and 2002, it meant that Iraq didn’t have any uranium at all. Now, suddenly, all of our friends on the left, the ones who admired the Wilsons so much, why of course they knew Iraq had unprocessed uranium.
So, let’s imagine that President Bush had done it the liberals’ way. He had let the UNSCOM inspectors continue, they’d have certified the country in compliance, and then the sanctions would have ended, say in mid 2004. Saddam Hussein would still be in power, his people would still have been brutalized daily, and he’d have had the full economic resources to do what he wasn’t able to do during the sanctions period.
Then, around, say, July of 2008, we’d have the Democrats screaming that Iraq is working toward building Teh Bomb, and it’s all George Bush’s fault.
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