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| Iraq | |
| Weapons grade plutonium in Iraq? | |
| 2003-04-10 | |
| FOXNEWS reporting possible find of weapons grade plutonium in Iraq by the US marines south of Baghdad. Smoking gun? More... U.S. officials are investigating a massive underground nuclear facility that was discovered below the Al Tuwaitha complex of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission in a suburban town south of Baghdad. Marine nuclear and intelligence experts have far found 14 buildings that have high levels of radiation, an embedded reporter from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported Thursday, noting that some of the tests have found nuclear residue too deadly for human occupation. The Marine radiation detectors go "off the charts" a few hundred meters outside the nuclear compound, where locals say "missile water" is stored in enormous caverns, the correspondent, Carl Prine, reported. Prine is embedded with the U.S. 1st Marine Division. This underground discovery could still test to be perfectly legitimate and offer no proof of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. The CIA encouraged international inspectors in the fall of 2002 to probe Al Tuwaitha for weapons of mass destruction, and the inspectors came away empty handed. "They went through that site multiple times, but did they go underground? I never heard anything about that," physicist David Albright, a former IAEA Action Team inspector in Iraq from 1992 to 1997, told the Tribune-Review. "The Marines should be particularly careful because of those high readings," he told the paper. "Three hours at levels like that and people begin to vomit. That leads me to wonder, if the readings are accurate, whether radioactive material was deliberately left there to expose people to dangerous levels. You couldn't do scientific work in levels like that. You would die." Capt. John Seegar, a combat engineer commander from Houston, is currently running the operation in Al Tuwaitha. "I've never seen anything like it, ever," he told the Tribune-Review. "How did the world miss all of this? Why couldn't they see what was happening here?"
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| Posted by:sonic |
| #7 you cant rush to making Plutonium. building the facility to make it (or highly enriched Uranium) takes awhile - they were supposed to be at least a year away, and facility would have to be big and probably unhideable - so theyve been doing this for awhile, and have done amazing things undergeound (unless they bought it on the black market?????) This is VERY big if true - bigger than chem or bio finds - so I will wait patiently for confirmation. |
| Posted by: liberalhawk 2003-04-10 16:53:18 |
| #6 Plutonium is created by neutron bombardment of Uranium inside a reactor. The Pu is later chemically separated, leaving behind lots of irradiated U and fission byproducts, generally highly radioactive. Plutonium itself, while extremely poisonous, isn't all that radioactive. |
| Posted by: Anonymous 2003-04-10 16:52:50 |
| #5 Perhaps the Iraqis in the last few weeks tried to rush making a nuclear weapon, leading to the current high levels of radioactivity. I know that if I were Saddam I would have been bashing some heads together to obtain nuclear weapons. Bashing some heads together ... that's an unfortunate phrase. |
| Posted by: A 2003-04-10 16:40:09 |
| #4 After touring the facility, Geraldo Rivera said, "This place even more intigueing than Al Capones Vault." |
| Posted by: Mike N. 2003-04-10 14:55:16 |
| #3 From sonic's link: "The IAEA probed the Al-Tuwaitha site 12 times over the last four months ...IAEA investigators said they would be 'surprised, but not necessarily shocked' if Coalition scientists uncovered illegal atomic weapons production at Al-Tuwaitha." So much for the IAEA inspections. F@#king weasels. |
| Posted by: Tom 2003-04-10 14:08:28 |
| #2 Another LINK |
| Posted by: sonic 2003-04-10 13:33:02 |
| #1 Oh God I hope NOT! |
| Posted by: Ptah 2003-04-10 13:09:13 |