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550 Metric Tons of Uranium Removed From Iraq
Orion Blastar tips us to an AP report that 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" uranium has successfully been removed from Iraq. The operation lasted three months, and it required 37 separate flights and an 8,500-mile trip by boat to reach a port in Montreal. Quoting:
"While yellowcake alone is not considered potent enough for a so-called 'dirty bomb' -- a conventional explosive that disperses radioactive material -- it could stir widespread panic if incorporated in a blast. Yellowcake also can be enriched for use in reactors and, at higher levels, nuclear weapons using sophisticated equipment. The Iraqi government sold the yellowcake to a Canadian uranium producer, Cameco Corp., in a transaction the official described as worth 'tens of millions of dollars.' A Cameco spokesman, Lyle Krahn, declined to discuss the price, but said the yellowcake will be processed at facilities in Ontario for use in energy-producing reactors."
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Its easier to make WMD out of oil (napalm) than it is to make them out of yellowcake.
This stuff was most certainly never going to be used in any kinds of weapons program. Iraw never had the facilities to process this stuff at the levels required, and even if they did it would probably be cheaper and easier to just buy black market soviet stuff en masse.
Carbonized iron (steel) is about three times the weight of aluminum but also nearly twice as strong, so you need less of it.
Here's what the plane would look like.
(The USSR didn't have much aluminum - or any way to import it - in WW2.)
Of course, by "US" you mean "Russia", to which the US gives several billion dollars a year to dispose of their stockpile which is far larger. The US nuclear weapon inventory is a lot smaller than it used to be, and most of what is categorized as a nuke is actually a disassembled trigger rather than a warhead, and the US will have finished disposal of its chemical weapons in the next few years (not so for several other countries). The nukes (both US and the fissile material the US buys from Russia) are turned into reactor fuel.
You might want to double check your assertions about US weapons of mass destruction. The Cold War was a long time ago.
Which is what made the story so ridiculous. Iraq already *had* large amounts of yellowcake. It was produced as a byproduct of phosphate mining back in the 70s and 80s, back when they actually had a nuclear program. The concept that they were going to buy more was transparently idiotic to anyone who had actually studied the Iraqi nuclear program. Which is why there was such an international uproar: because a lot of people actually *had* studied the Iraqi nuclear program.
The same thing with the aluminum tubes. Iraq's centrifuges called for flow-formed maraging steel rotors. Unless they had *entirely scrapped all of their previous progress that they spent ages developing*, an aluminum that's ill-suited for welding and would easily have snapped under the centripetal force wouldn't have done a darned thing for them. On the other hand, it was the exact same type of tubing known to be used for small Iraqi military rockets. The concept was widely mocked by the international community and the international press. In the US, not so much. In fact, they mocked the concept that it would be used for Iraqi rockets (despite us knowing about said rockets), talking about how even we use poorer alloys than that for our rockets, and completely ignoring the fact that the Iraqis used a higher quality aluminum to compensate for lower manufacturing quality.
The only way I would lionize Dick Cheney would be while he was still alive, and it would involve actual lions.
Actually, if you're speaking of the genocide against the Kurds, there was international outrage, it made the front page of every major European newspapers, and UN sanctions were going to be imposed against Iraq. It's just that the US vetoed those sanctions and shortly after -- the US gave Iraq one billion dollars in loans (that never got paid back by the way).
Like I said, it did have a mechanism, but the US vetoed it. At the time of the genocide, the US government supported Saddam, and more importantly -- it supported Saddam when there was an international backlash against him for that specific War Crime. So, you've got it completely backwards.
Him and countless others. It's not as if North Korea was a big surprise for instance.
Him and countless others. By the way, are you even aware that we're contaminating our very own soldiers (in addition to the locals) by using depleted uranium as heavy ammo? This is 'Agent Orange' all over again. Make the soldiers handle something toxic (and by the way, I am not a tree-hugger -- I am aware that not all radiation is toxic, but in this case depleted uranium and even pulvarized depleted uranium is tremendously toxic). Tell your own soldiers that it's perfectly safe. Deny everything for as long as possible. Label all the critics conspiracy theorists (not that this label is not sometimes correctly warranted). And watch your former soldiers drop like flies ten to thirty years from now.
Do you know a little bit about dog training? Forgive the analogy, but dogs are pack animals just like we are, and when I use that term -- I mean no disrespect by it. But when a country does something wrong, you must come down on it immediately -- not ten or twenty years later -- otherwise your intervention will seem self-serving (or at the very least completely disconnected from the original event). And when one of your friends (or one of your family members) does something horribly wrong, let's say that a family member of yours commits a genocide -- well you stop him -- or at the very least you stop supporting him -- and you do that immediately. This ethics of "You're either for us, or you're against us" is the most retarded tribal thinking there ever was. This kind of tribal thinking is something I would expect from Iraqi or Iranian people, not from the President of the United States. When someone does something wrong, whether they're with us or against us, you come down hard on them. Same thing if our very own people have done those horrible things, we take care and punish of our own people for Crimes of War as swiftly, as transparently, and as fairly as we do it for others. That's the only way we can stop this kind of tribal feuding in the long-run.
How bad? But the neo-cons wanted to invade Iraq a long time ago, and for reasons of strategic hegemony -- not supposedly because things were "bad" in Iraq. This is documented, from their very own mouths. Asking this question implies that you do not seem to know this.
So now, let me ask you. When we know that our own government is making bad decisions, and when we know that our own government is clearly contradicting the constitution (for instance, the Constitution makes t