> ... asserted his claim to Kuwait *after* acquiring nuclear weapons - > and then began to talk about securing the Muslim Holy Land as leader > of the Arab people....
What nuclear weapons? He wasn't building any. On the contrary, Saddam Hussein's government was actively working on them. That is why some people were worried in 2002 -- they really did not think that Saddam Hussein was lying when he claimed to be continuing the effort. That is one of the reasons the Blix reports were so worrisome. The reports could not provide assurances that the Iraqis were lying and that they were not pursuing nuclear or, in a weaker situation in 2000, radiological weapons. (And the lack of US follow up means we still lack assurances.) Indeed, in the latter 1980s and early 1990s, to separate isotopes of uranium, Saddam Hussein's government was building calutrons, of all things. The US abandoned calutrons in the late 1940s or early 1950s as being too inefficent. In WWII, the US found that they separated more efficiently when provided partially enriched uranium, from the diffusion plant, than unenriched uranium. The US used calutrons because Lawrence knew how to design them and because they worked. As far as I know, the Iraqis never tried to build a diffusion plant. (There is the story that one of the Manhattan project people decided that silver would be good for calutrons' wire. Silver is a better conductor than copper and copper was being used for cartridges and other military purposes. The man, perhaps Gen. Groves, visited the Secretary of the Treasury to ask for several tons of silver, which the US government kept as backing for its `silver certificates' that could be redeemed in silver dollars. I got some when I was a child; but I don't have them any more. The Secretary of the Treasury is reputed to have said, `in this office, we speak of ounces of silver, not of tons'. But he loaned the silver.) As far as I know, the modern equivalents of calutrons are still used to produce highly purified isotopes. I think that a good portion, maybe all, of the uranium used in the Hiroshima bomb went through calutrons. (The Trinity and Nagasaki bombs used plutonium.) In the 1990s, pictures of the Iraqi calutron vacuum vessels were released by the UN inspectors and I saw them in Aviation Week and Space Technology. At the same time, or a bit later, I read about calutron history and design. Also, at that time, Saddam Hussein was researching delivery vehicles. People laugh about one of his delivery vehicles, his big gun. But it could have been defended against Iranian attack and maybe Saudi and Kuwaiti attack, too. (It could not have been defended against US attack.) The inspectors did not discover either the bomb project or the delivery projects for some time -- they were fooled. -- Robert J. Chassell [EMAIL PROTECTED] GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l