Shawn writes:

> Tell you what, I'm
>  going to hide a 1 square foot box here in California, I'll paint on the
>  side "WMD".  Now, come and find it.

Reality doesn't seem to much affect the opinions of the various posters on
this subject. The pre-war claim was that Saddam had 38,000 liters of botulinum
toxin, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent,
along with a reconstituted nuclear weapons program.

Beyond the fact that getting all of that material into a 1 square foot box
would have been somewhat difficult, the production facilities for these weapons
-- along with the people who staffed them -- would clearly have been very
hard, if not impossible, to hide. Before the UN inspectors were forced to leave in
advance of the American-led invasion of Iraq, one of them said after being
lead on one wild goose chase after another, "American intelligence is sh*t".

Although that's basically the conclusion that everyone is now forced to come
to, at the time that assessment was dismissed by the current administration as
the weak-kneed, pacificist leanings of the Old European intellectuals on the
inspection team.

In that regard, on the isolated subject of whether the aluminum tubes that
Iraq was ordering at the time were for nuclear centrifuges or not, there was an
article in last August's Washington Post that's especially worth reading very
carefully and very slowly:

   http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39500-2003Aug9

I've mentioned before that during the height of the Cold War, I worked as a
nuclear weapons physicist at the US Army's Nuclear Weapons Effects Laboratory,
White Sands Missile Range, NM. The technical library for the lab was encased
in a ray-proof room with a vault door on it, to which only the director and his
secretary knew the combination. You were obviously not allowed to take any
kind of recording device into the vault, including during some periods of
heightened sensitivity, even pencils and paper, even though you may have written a
signficant fraction of the documents in the library yourself.

That technical library was a revelation to me. I mentioned on several
occasions to the director of the lab, Glenn Elder, now deceased, that if we really
wanted to confuse the Soviets, we should just ship them that library, lock,
stock and barrel, the information in it being such nonsense.

The late 1960's and early 1970's were not at all like now. The threat of a
moment's notice nuclear annihilation was very, very real. I am not paranoid by
nature, but at the time, given that the Soviets and we had a combined 30,000
nuclear warheads pointed at each other, all ready to launched within minutes, I
did not expect to live out a full life -- and if more people had understood
the threat we lived under, they would not have either. In contrast, thirty years
later in 2002, it was clear that Iraq represented virtually no threat to us
at all.

Nonetheless, some conditions remain the same. The most irrational, paranoid,
fearful threat assessments always tend to rise to the highest levels of
classification and are forwarded on with the greatest vigor. The material in that
technical library was filled with such paranoia, misinterpretation,
misinformation and aberrant physical descriptions that most of the reports had no
possibility of ever being true. But that was also much of the information that was
forwarded on -- often generally authored by the least talented, most inept of the
staff at NWEL, and there were people there who were quite inept.

This material existed in the technical library solely because it was never
reviewed in any thoughtful or substantial manner, in the fashion common to
scientific journals. Indeed, this was the first time in my life -- although it's
happened several times since -- that I have became overwhelmingly convinced of
the value of intense peer review and the rejection of any document that does
not meet the highest technical standards.

But it was also the most nonsensenical material that was used to formulate
our national survival policies. When you read the Washington Post article, pay
special attention to the man named Joe. I knew half a dozen "Joe"'s during my
tenure at NWEL -- and they're the ones who nearly got us all killed.

Wirt Atmar

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