Did anyone ever claim that there was no equipment in Iraq that could possibly used as part of a nuclear weapons development program?

The Duelfer report stated that no stockpiles or active production facilities had been found, but that significant evidence exists to show that Saddam was preserving the capacity to rebuild WMD systems on short notice, including nuclear, once the heat of the sanctions and inspections had died down. Duelfer stated that taking Saddam out had been a good idea. The first point got a lot more play than the second, and the third point got almost no play at all.

A person conceding that Saddam represented a serious potential danger would see the missing equipment as part of that danger, and could be consistent about complaining about its loss.

Those in the media and elsewhere dismissed Saddam as harmless. They had earlier dismissed discoveries of buried centrifuge parts, hidden documentation, and nuclear scientists kept on the back burner. The thesis is that had Saddam been left alone, there would have been no danger. Given that premise, how can they now maintain with any consistency that Iraq was full of the makings of potential nuclear bombs, and that the loss of this stuff is serious?

If the missing equipment and materials are deemed to be such that unsophisticated neighbor nations or terrorist enclaves could use them to build atomic weapons--and why else would their loss be considered dangerous--then why would that same equipment not have been a dangerous resource for a wealthy tyrant freed of sanctions and with the inspection process riddled with his own people?