Iraq’s Ambassador to the United Nations Mohammed Ali Alhakim has informed the United Nations today that some 40 kg of “nuclear materials” have been seized by ISIS, and “can be used in manufacturing weapons of mass destruction.”
ISIS apparently got the radioactive compounds at the University of Mosul when they seized the city, and while Iraq was keen to push the idea of a proliferation risk, US officials familiar with Iraq’s remaining nuclear capabilities say there is little real risk.
That’s because what was in Mosul was not enriched uranium, let alone enriched to weapons grade. That means even if ISIS somehow built a whole enrichment program for this fairly trivial amount of uranium they’d be able to produce only about 288 grams of weapons-grade uranium, far short of what is needed for a single bomb.
The attempt to equate anything nuclear with a WMD is simply not true, and while it is conceivable that any isotopes could be used in some sort of “dirty bomb,” the realistic damage of such a weapon is minimal, much smaller than the problems the US caused with its widespread use of depleted uranium munitions during the occupation.
You could probably get a few million times 288 grams just from what the US dropped in Iraq. But it'd surely make a respectable amount of vaseline glass.
WMD was already a vague, sensationalist, PR, dumbing down name for CBR. Chemical, Radiological, Biological was a better name for what we were 'originally' supposed to think of as 'WMD.' Notice the name itself gives you an inventory or short list of things to check on in case of claims about 'threats,' and that it sounds perfectly dry, sterile, technical, not especially scary or daunting. Something one might've thought especially nice to have in case war & peace decisions are being made over it. You might then eventually come to the conclusion that 'WMD' was a word intended to expand it's meaning to include perhaps e.g., hair dye + nail polish remover (happened!!: c.f. Najibullah Zazi)…any household chemicals provided the target of 'investigation' is witchy enough…birds or housepets with scary sounding contagious diseases…any contraband with imagined potential uses scary enough to notionally justify making a police state reeeeallly nosy and invasive… your car, possibly, provided your mugshot can be sufficiently sinister-looking…certain plants…microbes…items mysteriously charged to your credit card, provided you're politics are sufficiently creepy…eye-of-newt, surprisingly…
Just to suggest that the word belongs, say, in the keywords of a web page, but only belongs in the dialogue when critiquing/mocking it's very use.
Wow- all this stuff was just laying around at the University and we missed it? Or did we know it was there and knew it wasn't weaponized, or even enough to make it so even with a full-fledged program? Either way, this is just a sad effort to get the US to step in a do something on behalf of the Maliki government which is aligned with Iran, our alleged target in the 'axis of evil' in the region. Somehow, it reeks of desperation- Iraq is going to fall. The only question now is who is willing to expend lives and treasure to extend the death watch?
Well, I think its a great thing that its not in Saddam’s hands, because we all know he would have just given it to Al Qaeda … :p