American Data Aided Iraq Arms Program

[Barrett808]

American Data Aided Iraq Arms Program
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent

After hunting for days, the Iraqi physicist finally checked a long-locked attic room. There he spotted a box, coated with decades of dust, and opened it. Sure enough, it was full of reams of data — American data — on how to make a nuclear bomb.

"In it were the Manhattan Project books and reports," Imad Khadduri recalls, referring to the U.S. program that produced America's first atomic weapons during World War II.

With that and other U.S. material, Khadduri and his colleagues in 1987 painstakingly began collecting patent designs for critical equipment. "Within four months," he says, "the scientists and engineers had their hands full of immediately applicable scientific information. ... They quickly set to work."

With that, too, Iraq (news - web sites) joined the list of countries whose bomb programs stemmed in part from the U.S. "Atoms for Peace" initiative, inaugurated by President Eisenhower 50 years ago this month with a historic speech at the United Nations (news - web sites).

Atoms for Peace was designed to sell U.S. nuclear technology for electricity generation and other peaceful purposes, but it had "an unintended outcome," says Peter R. Lavoy, an American expert on weapons proliferation. "Some recipient nations did divert U.S. nuclear assistance to military uses."

(more)

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20031213/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_s_eureka_moment

[UpInArms]

1. we are such an

intelligent purveyor of destruction

In his memoir, Khadduri recalls that Iraq's Atoms for Peace gift package was to have included a small U.S. nuclear research reactor. But the Iraqi socialist revolution of 1958 intervened, and the reactor was diverted to Iran, then a U.S. friend — and now a focus of U.S. concern about possible nuclear weapons-making.

That reactor is believed still operating, after helping train generations of Iranian physicists.

we shall reap what we have sown with the weapons that we have developed and spread across the globe

:(

[Barrett808]

2. This story doesn't even scratch the surface of the direct arms sales

to Iraq. In flagrant violation of arms controls laws.

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. Those laws were non existent when

Eisenhower sent his guifts across the world