I put this in this forum since it may have implications for the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
"March 13, 2005
Looting at Iraqi Weapons Plants Was Systematic, Official Says
By JAMES GLANZ and WILLIAM J. BROAD
AGHDAD, Iraq, March 12 - In the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms, a senior Iraqi official said this week in the government's first extensive comments on the looting. .....
The Iraqi official, Sami al-Araji, the deputy minister of industry, said it appeared that a highly organized operation had pinpointed specific plants in search of valuable equipment, some of which could be used for both military and civilian applications, and carted the machinery away. ...
The threat posed by these types of facilities was cited by the Bush administration as a reason for invading Iraq, but the installations were left largely unguarded by allied forces in the chaotic months after the invasion. ...
Dr. Araji said equipment capable of making parts for missiles as well as chemical, biological and nuclear arms was missing from 8 or 10 sites that were the heart of Iraq's dormant program on unconventional weapons. After the invasion, occupation forces found no unconventional arms, and C.I.A. inspectors concluded that the effort had been largely abandoned after the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
Dr. Araji said he had no evidence regarding where the equipment had gone. But his account raises the possibility that the specialized machinery from the arms establishment that the war was aimed at neutralizing had made its way to the black market or was in the hands of foreign governments.
"Targeted looting of this kind of equipment has to be seen as a proliferation threat," said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a private nonprofit organization in Washington that tracks the spread of unconventional weapons. ...
Dr. Araji said that if the equipment had left the country, its most likely destination was a neighboring state.
David Albright, an authority on nuclear weaponry who is president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, said that Syria and Iran were the countries most likely to be in the market for the kind of equipment that Mr. Hussein purchased, ...
Al Qaqaa, with some 1,100 structures, manufactured powerful explosives that could be used for conventional missile warheads and for setting off a nuclear detonation. Last fall, Iraqi government officials warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that some 377 tons of those explosives were missing after the invasion. But Al Qaqaa also contained a wide variety of weapons manufacturing machinery, including 800 pieces of chemical equipment....
Before the invasion, the United Nations was monitoring those kinds of sites. ...
No Saudi or Iranian Replies
The recent monitoring agency report said Unmovic had asked Iraq's neighbors if they were aware of whether any equipment under agency monitoring had moved in or through their countries. Syrian officials, it said, replied that "no relevant scrap from Iraq had passed through Syria." The agency, the report added, had yet to receive a response from Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Dr. Hasani, the Iraqi industry minister, said the sites of greatest concern had been part of the Military Industrialization Commission, a department within the ministry until it became a separate entity in the 1990's. The commission, widely known as the M.I.C., was dissolved after the fall of Baghdad, and responsibility for its roughly 40 sites was divided between the ministries of industry and finance, Dr. Hasani said. "We got 11 of them," he said.
Dr. Araji, whose tenure with the ministry goes back to the 1980's, is now involved in plans to use the sites as manufacturing centers in what the ministry hopes will be a new free-market economy in Iraq. ....
Agency inspectors, in visiting other countries, have discovered tons of industrial scrap, some radioactively contaminated, from Iraq, the report noted. It added, however, that the agency had been unable to track down any of the high-quality, dual-use equipment or materials.
"The disappearance of such equipment," the report emphasized, "may be of proliferation significance." ...
In interviews, officials of the monitoring commission and the atomic energy agency said the two agencies had heard nothing from Baghdad - with one notable exception. On Oct. 10, the Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology wrote to the atomic agency to say a stockpile of high explosives at Al Qaqaa had been lost because of "theft and looting."
During the American presidential election last fall, news of that letter ignited a political firestorm. Privately, officials of the monitoring commission and the atomic energy agency have speculated on whether the political uproar made Baghdad reluctant to disclose more details of looting."
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quote:
the sites of greatest concern had been part of the Military Industrialization Commission, a department within the ministry until it became a separate entity in the 1990's. The commission, widely known as the M.I.C., was dissolved after the fall of Baghdad, and responsibility for its roughly 40 sites was divided between the ministries of industry and finance, Dr. Hasani said. "We got 11 of them," he said.Dr. Araji, whose tenure with the ministry goes back to the 1980's,
How interesting. The Americans (and other allies) recycled a lot of former Nazis. Did they repeat this exercise in Iraq?