@@ Capability is not tantamount @@
Arash
December 13, 2004
What ElBaradei Said
Dr. James Gordon Prather
Nuclear weapons physicist
David Sanger - a New York Times reporter - has actually visited the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna and interviewed its
director general, Mohamed ElBaradei. Sanger's resulting report - entitled
"When a Virtual Bomb May Be Better Than the Real Thing" - appeared last
Sunday. http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2004/041205-virtual-bomb.htm
Until now, Sanger and other media sycophants have been uncritically
accepting neocon misinformation about nuclear programs - past and present -
in Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
The neocons had President Bush say this about Iraq, Iran, and North Korea in
his 2002 State of the Union Address:
"States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil,
arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass
destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could
provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their
hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United
States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be
catastrophic.
"We'll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on
events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and
closer. The United States of America will not permit the world's most
dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."
Nine months later, Bush went to Congress seeking "specific statutory
authorization" to invade Iraq. He based his request upon a highly-classified
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that supposedly "proved" that Saddam
was reconstructing his nuke and chem-bio weapons programs, with the
intention of supplying those weapons to Islamic terrorists for use against
us.
That NIE turned out to be a neocon con job. Nevertheless,
"The president is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as
he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to defend the
national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed
by Iraq."
But there was a catch.
Before resorting to force, Bush had to satisfy Congress that "reliance on
peaceful means alone will not adequately protect the national security of
the United States."
That meant Bush had to give UN inspectors an opportunity to do a
go-anywhere, see-anything search of Iraq to see if a resort to force was
necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein.
By mid-March of 2003, the UN inspectors had reported back to the Security
Council that Saddam had made no attempt to reconstitute his weapons of mass
destruction programs since 1991 and had effectively been disarmed since at
least 1998.
Hence, it must have been absolutely stupefying to Iran and North Korea when
Dubya "determined" on March 19 that no "further diplomatic or other peaceful
means will adequately protect the national security of the United States
from the continuing threat posed by Iraq."
And he invaded Iraq the next day.
Bush had unilaterally abrogated - just after he went to Congress to ask for
authority to invade Iraq - the so-called Agreed Framework verified by the
IAEA, wherein North Korea froze all nuclear reactors and related facilities.
So, North Korea had withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,
ejected IAEA personnel, and restarted its plutonium-producing nuclear
reactor. Immediately after Bush invaded Iraq, North Korea announced it was
chemically recovering the weapons-grade plutonium already produced. Enough
for five or six nukes, according to U.S. intelligence estimates.
Now, there can be no question that ElBaradei was right about Iraq. But what
about Iran?
Well, after more than 20 months of go-anywhere, see-anything searching,
ElBaradei has found no indication that Iran has - or ever had - a nuclear
weapons program.
But the neocons claim that Iran's having the capability to enrich uranium is
tantamount to Iran's having nukes. That's nonsense, of course. Iran's having
the capability to enrich uranium is not even tantamount to having the
capability to produce the essentially pure uranium-235 required to make a
nuke.
And even if Iran did have the capability and had somehow managed to secretly
produce a few hundred pounds of uranium-235, that wouldn't be tantamount to
actually having nukes, either. Especially implosion-type nukes.
However, it has been widely reported that ElBaradei told Sanger that having
the capability was tantamount. ElBaradei didn't.
When asked whether he thought North Korea had actually made five or six
nukes with their weapons-grade plutonium or not, ElBaradei asked, "What's
the difference?" What ElBaradei meant was that, in his opinion, there is
very little difference in the deterrent value of real nukes and virtual
nukes.
He's wrong about that, of course. So are the neocons.
* Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing
official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal
Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the
Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the
Department of the Army. Dr. Prather also served as legislative assistant for
national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. -- ranking
member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy
Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a
nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.
http://www.antiwar.com/prather
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/archives.asp?AUTHOR_ID=35