Discussed, along with a lot of other things, here:

Q To either of you. We understand there are conclusive tests now on that shell, that artillery shell that exploded in Baghdad a couple of weeks ago, that it did contain sarin. Can you give us an update on that? And you haven't been pumping information out about this particular case. And I'm wondering, is there a sense that you're gun shy about talking of weapons of mass destruction, even when you find one?

GEN. RODRIGUEZ: Well, that was a pre-Gulf War shell is what it was determined to be, first of all. So that's, you know, in a different category, obviously, than you know, other chemical weapons out there. But --

Q But is it a concern? Is it significant? Is it --

GEN. RODRIGUEZ: It's -- well, we continue -- like I said, it's the only two that we've seen the entire time. We continue to operate the same way we did before, and we'll continue to continue to pursue it with everything that we -- every intelligence asset we have.

But it's been proved to be sarin, as you stated. We think we've covered that with everybody, and we continue testing and checking into it. But it was a 155 (millimeter) shell from pre-Gulf War.

Q But let me say, is that --

MR. DI RITA: Let me just follow up.

GEN. RODRIGUEZ: Pre-Gulf War. It's 1980s.

Q 1991 Gulf War, not the --

GEN. RODRIGUEZ: Right. Pre-Gulf War in 1991.

Q But does that make the sarin any less dangerous, or --

Q How old?

Q -- does the pre-Gulf War status make it any less a significant find, or does it make it any less --

MR. DI RITA: Okay, let's let me take that on for a minute. It's too early to tell if that's -- how much of a concern this is. But here's -- but we do know some things about sarin and Saddam Hussein.

We know that he produced -- and this is through defectors as well as his own declarations -- that they -- well, first of all, we know that they used sarin in Halabja. That's what killed 5,000 Kurds. So we know that he's got a demonstrated use of this chemical. We know that they tested sarin shells. Defectors told us that they tested these things. We also know that he produced somewhere between 7 (hundred tons) and 850 tons of this stuff and only accounted for the destruction of about 70 tons of it.

So it would -- I think it's too early to say that it's a serious thing that we just know has got to be worse, but it's also too early to say that this is no big deal. I mean, this could be a very big deal. It's just too early to tell.

There's obviously a lot more interest in trying to determine, is there another stockpile of these shells out there. As I said, we know that he was testing them. We know that he had undeclared -- or he had stockpiles of it that were not conclusively proved to have been destroyed. And we know that he used this particular chemical.

So, you know, there's an awful lot of smoke here. There's no question about it. And sometimes where there's smoke, there's fire. And it's just too early to say that it's -- I certainly don't dismiss it as, "Well, it's pre-war, no big deal," because it could be a lot -- it could be a lot more; it could be nothing. And it's just too early to tell.

But the ISG is over there, the Iraq Survey Group. They're doing their work. Charles Duelfer, I saw him on TV today. He's systematically going through the assessments that they've made thus far based on the intelligence haul. There's an enormous amount of intelligence and documents that still haven't even begun to be mined. And I just think -- I certainly am not trying to suggest that we know more than we know. But I'm also -- in the category of things we don't know we don't know is how big a deal this is.

My take on this, if the dating on it is correct, is that it's an item of interest, but unless there's more of them, especially in storage somewhere, I don't see this shell alone as the Smoking Gun. It's apparent that the DOD isn't really looking at it that way at this stage either. This would be one of those "unaccounted for" weapons. With any luck, there aren't a lot more of them.