When I read this report, it reminded me of an earlier incident in which Iraq had been caught trying to import a high-energy electrical switch called a krytron just before Gulf War I. Krytrons have many uses because they deliver precisely-timed high-energy electrical pulses, useful for such things as precision demolition, triggering conventional artillery shells...and initiating nuclear explosions.

Just now I Googled "krytron iraq" to refresh my memory, and one of the articles I found at Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists described how Bush the Elder used a very similar dodge to try and whip up support for his war.

Just two hours after U.S. warplanes began attacking Iraq on January 16, President Bush went on national television to report the goals of the assault. "As I report to you, air attacks are under way against military targets in Iraq. We are determined to knock out Saddam Hussein's nuclear bomb potential," the president said, before ticking off other objectives.



The prominence Bush gave to Iraq's nuclear "potential" repeated a theme that the administration began pushing vigorously last November as a rationale for the use of military force against that country. But after a months-long investigation of the requirements any country would need to build nuclear weapons, and an assessment of Iraq's ability to meet those requirements, we conclude that Saddam Hussein was many years away from developing usable nuclear weapons.

Indeed, the Iraqi nuclear bomb-making capability was so primitive that the international sanctions put in place after the August 2 invasion may have had more substantive effect than the tons of bombs dropped by U.S. and allied planes five months later. "There may be good reasons to go to war with Iraq," one U.S. government official said before January 16, "but Iraq's nuclear program isn't one of them."



Heck, if it worked once, why not recycle it? Remember that Dubya learned the fine art of deception at Pappy's knee, and remember that Pappy was, among other things, CIA Director.

The article is interesting and still relevant today. It's worth reading to get grounded in reality, to counterbalance the overheated rhetoric and inflated claims coming out of the Bush Regime these days. There's a lot of other interesting reading on the BAS site, too.

--Robert