Dr Kay's "two car garage" debunked!

[shockingelk]

"It is important to keep in mind that even the bulkiest materials we are searching for, in the quantities we would expect to find, can be concealed in spaces not much larger than a two car garage."
October 2, 2003
- David Kay

I decided to look at that.

In Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, we were told Iraq had "upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents" - we're not told what these munitions are, so let's assume they're very, very small - small enough for two to fit inside a paper towel tube. Paper towel tubes are 1 3/4 inches wide, and 5 1/2 inches tall. Thirty-thousand of these would fill an area a little larger than 18 x 18 feet wide and 12 feet high. One could park three Ford Explorers in this area. Maybe Kay misspoke, maybe he meant "three car garage."

Also in his State of the union address, President Bush told us of "25,000 liters of anthrax" and "38,000 liters of botulinum toxin". This is 63,000 liters. Visualize a half gallon of milk in a paper container, the type you typically find in stores. This container is about 9 x 4 x 4 inches and holds two quarts. The Iraqis would need 31,500 of these to store the anthrax and botulinum toxin mentioned in President Bush's speech. These would fit in a 656 square foot garage with 12 foot ceilings. If this garage was 18 feet deep, it would need to be about 36 1/2 feet wide. This is a garage that would hold six more Ford Explorers.

President Bush also told us Iraq had "materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent." I'm not sure about the materials needed to produce the gasses mentioned, but one can assume they would amount to at least 500 tons. A typical 40 foot semi trailer is built to carry a payload of no more than 30 tons. Dr Kay's garage would also have to hold 16 semi trailers to carry the 500 tons of material President Bush spoke of in his State of the Union address.

Bush revealed that there were "thousands of Iraqi security personnel ... at work hiding documents and materials from the U.N. inspectors." Two-thousand people qualifies as "thousands." A greyhound bus has a capacity of 55 persons. So we'd need to fit 36 Greyound busses in the garage as well.

So, it seems to me that when Dr. Kay said "two car garage", he misspoke. What he meant was a garage large enough to hold 16 semi-trailers, 36 Greyhound busses and nine Ford Explorers.

References:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/10/02/kay.report/
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/01/20030128-19.html
http://google.com/search?q=semi+trailer+net+payload+weight+standard+container
http://www.greyhound.com/company/fleet.shtml

[LittleApple81]

1. This was fun to read. Thanks.

[seamarq]

2. Well put.

[dfong63]

3. check your math - i think you've made an error

let's take one simple example.

using your dimensions, each "munition" might be a cylinder of 7/4" diam and 11/2" height. imagine we're going to stack these things in a vertical orientation, in a garage with a floor space of 18' by 18'. the simplest way to do it would be to pack them in straight, aligned rows. (you could do better than that by staggering the rows, but let's ignore that fact for now.) one edge of the garage is 18' = 216". that means you could line up 216/(7/4) or about 123 per edge. so an 18' by 18' garage floor could hold 123*123 or about 15,000 of them.

and that's just the first layer. since they're 11/2" in height, a 12' high garage could hold about 12*12/(11/2) or about 25 layers.

using your numbers, about 375,000 munitions could fit in this size of garage. a room 1/10 of this volume could easily fit 30,000 such munitions.

i think you've made some other errors too, but let's start with this one.

[shockingelk]

5. oops

You're right.

[dfong63]

4. next,

let's consider your example of 63,000 liters of toxins. a liter is 1000 cubic cm's, meaning a cube 10cm on a side holds 1 liter. 10cm is approx 4", so a cube 4" on a side would hold 1 liter. such cubes could be packed 3 per linear foot, so a cubic foot would hold 3*3*3 = 27 liters. a garage with a 654 sq foot area, and 12' high, could hold 654*12*27 or approximately 210,000 liters. your garage dimensions are easily 3x larger than they need to be for the given quantity of toxins.