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Experts: Saddam's Uranium Enough for One Nuke
Though President Bush didn't mention it in his speech yesterday rebutting critics of his administration's use of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, experts say that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled enough partially enriched uranium to produce at least one full-fledged nuclear bomb. Commenting on Saddam's enriched uranium stash after the U.S. Energy Department removed it to Oak Ridge, Tenn., in June 2004, top physicist Ivan Oelrich told the Associated Press: "[Saddam's] 1.95 tons of low-enriched uranium could be used to produce enough highly enriched uranium to make a single nuclear bomb." Oelrich, a leading member of the Federation of American Scientists, is not alone in that assessment.
Story Continues Below Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, told the New York Times that Saddam's partially enriched uranium "could have been further enriched to make it useful in a weapon." After the U.S. removed Saddam's nuke fuel stockpile, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi confirmed that it posed a great danger to the region's security interests. "These materials, which are potential weapons of mass murder, are not welcome in our country and their production is unacceptable," Allawi told Agence France Press. Even Saddam's 500-ton un-enriched uranium stockpile, which he stored at the same nuclear weapons research facility where inspectors found his partially enriched stash, posed a potential threat. In a March 2003 op-ed piece for London's Evening Standard, Norman Dombey, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Sussex, calculated that Saddam's yellowcake could have yielded a staggering nuclear arsenal. "You have a warehouse containing 500 tons of natural uranium," Dombey wrote. "You need 25 kilograms of U235 to build one weapon. How many nuclear weapons can you build? "The answer is 142 [nuclear bombs]," he said. Editor's note:
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