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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2006-11-03

NYTimes: Iraq Had Advanced Nuclear Program

From Friday morning's NYTimes:

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. . .

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.” . . .

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.

The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away. . . .

In Europe, a senior diplomat said atomic experts there had studied the nuclear documents on the Web site and judged their public release as potentially dangerous. “It’s a cookbook,” said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of his agency’s rules. “If you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things.”

Got that? Some of the documents taken from Saddam's regime were "a cookbook" for making a nuke.

Oh, but surely, Saddam would have never shared this information with anybody else, would he? There's absolutely no reason to think that the information held by the Iraqi regime was going to be shared with other bad players on the world scene.

Riiiight.

So the Times thinks publishing important stuff is dangerous and bad, unless they're the ones doing it. And we absolutely have to prevent this information from going anywhere . . . except taking out the people who are responsible for it.

For what it's worth, none of the other major newspapers seem to care to pick up this bit of reportage.
Posted by: Michael / 11/03/2006 12:36:00 AM

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