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| Criticism of David Kay’s Conclusion About WMD in Iraq |
| 2004-03-03 |
| An essay, titled "Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Belmont Club commented about an American Thinker article, referenced recently here in Rantburg, by Douglas Hanson, criticizing inspector David Kay’s conlusion that Iraq had no WMD during the recent period. The essay points out that the acquisition of WMD no longer requires a major scientific or industrial infrastructure. The essay’s conclusion: The key problem to finding Iraqi WMDs comes from the underlying assumptions about how large a national WMD program had to be. In the classic Cold War model, any WMD program was assumed to be very large, a copy of the Manhattan Project. Following from that assumption, the tools used to detect these programs were overhead imaging, environmental sampling and debriefing technical personnel. These tools did an excellent job at finding centrifuges, reactors, weapons storage facilities and their associated delivery platforms. But the rollup of the A. Q. Khan network, the "Johnny Appleseed" of nuclear proliferation, in the New Yorker’s felicitous phrase, showed the world another model, and in the context of Iraq, the more likely model of WMD development. In this model, the only relevant WMD manufacturing facility is a pile of cash. Everything, including possibly the fissile material, was potentially for sale from A. Q. Khan’s worldwide network. ... Therefore the lower size bound of an Iraqi WMD program was no facilities at all. An Iraqi WMD program only had to be as big as Al Qaeda’s. Saddam may have simply decided it was cheaper to buy a weapon or near-final components instead of building them from scratch. The assumptions about the character of Iraq’s possible WMD programs bear directly on the failure of prewar Allied intelligence to characterize and describe the program accurately. If the relevant model was not a cheap version of the Manhattan Project but rather the A. Q. Khan commodity model, it would have misled the analysts seriously and caused them to overlook the one alarming corollary. Every WMD component in the A. Q. Khan manufacturing chain had a tradeable value. In that universe, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons are not merely instruments of state power but fungible financial assets. Saddam would have looked at a nuke or bioweapon not simply as a lethal device but as an investment. Dr. David Kay’s findings may not mean that Saddam destroyed or hid his weapons before the war. It may merely mean that he sold them. |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #1 Say, how much WMD can I get for $3.50? Hmmm. Well then, how much can I get for $1,500,000,000? |
| Posted by: Hyper 2004-3-3 11:26:54 PM |