Yellowcake Footnote

For all the fabricated kerfuffle over whether or not Saddam Hussein sought to purchase uranium ore from Niger in recent years, there is one small detail that is, perhaps, getting overlooked:

By April 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, Saddam Hussein had stockpiled 500 tons of yellowcake uranium at his al Tuwaitha nuclear weapons development plant south of Baghdad....

Responding to the firestorm that erupted after [Yellowcake Joe] Wilson's July 2003 [tissue of lies] column, Prime Minister Tony Blair told reporters:

"In case people should think that the whole idea of a link between Iraq and Niger was some invention, in the 1980s we know for sure that Iraq purchased round about 270 tons of uranium from Niger."

Annnnnd....

....amidst Saddam's yellowcake stockpile, U.S. weapons inspectors found "some 1.8 tons" that they "classified as low-enriched uranium."...

Consulted about the low-enriched uranium discovery...Ivan Oelrich, a physicist at the Federation of American Scientists, told the Associated Press that if it was of the 3% to 5% level of enrichment common in fuel for commercial power reactors, the 1.8 tons could be used to produce enough highly enriched uranium to make a single nuclear bomb.

And Saddam's top nuclear scientist, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, had the centrifuges and other technology he needed to do this, buried in his backyard:

"The centrifuge is the single most dangerous piece of nuclear technology," Dr. Obeidi says in his book. "With advances in centrifuge technology, it is now possible to conceal a uranium enrichment program inside a single warehouse."

All of which goes to show what mischief can be wrought when any important, or "controversial," event is taken out of proper context - and when dangerous material isn't taken out of the hands of those who would use it for its intended purpose.