Saddam's yellowcake again

The shipment this spring of 550 metric tons of yellowcake uranium from Iraq argues that the United States and its allies were right to be very worried about Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons intentions.Working in secret with the new Iraqi government for fear that terrorists might interfere with the operation, the United States spirited the material out of the country and sold it to a Canadian company that will use it to produce nuclear power, officials revealed early this month.That's a lot of uranium -- enough, by some estimates, to build 100 nuclear weapons. Transporting it required 37 military flights.U.S. soldiers discovered the stockpile of yellowcake at the former Tuwaitha nuclear complex soon after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Looting villagers had already removed some of the barrels, apparently intending to reuse them as drinking-water cisterns. Because the uranium is radioactive, U.S. officials feared it might be stolen and employed in "dirty bombs," or worse, if not guarded.The presence of so much uranium, of course, renews questions about what Saddam intended to do with it. The complex was dismantled after the Gulf War in 1991, and the International Atomic Energy Agency was reportedly keeping watch over the material.But it never ordered the yellowcake removed. And, before the 2003 Iraq war, Saddam was clearly angling to thwart the weapons-inspections regime implemented after the Gulf War. His use of bribes through the oil-for-food racket and his open defiance of the IAEA, leading to multiple U.N. resolutions sanctioning him, suggest strongly that he was up to something very nasty -- perhaps biding his time until he could proceed with building nuclear weapons.This is not the first time that yellowcake uranium has been linked to Saddam's name. President Bush disclosed that British intelligence sources believed that Saddam was trying to buy more yellowcake from the government of Niger before the war. Ambassador Joseph Wilson, husband to former CIA operative Valerie Plame, famously traveled to Niger and proclaimed in a New York Times article that there was no truth to the report, lending comfort to those who argued that Bush "lied" about Saddam's intentions. The facts of such clandestine operations are not clear, however, even to intelligence experts, and Saddam got 550 tons of the stuff in earlier years from somewhere.As Reuters reported in an article about the recent transfer, "no evidence has been found that Saddam continued a nuclear-weapons program after 1991." But Saddam had some reason for defying inspections and maintaining his huge stockpile of uranium, in a country whose energy needs could be met easily by its abundant oil. Trusting him under such circumstances would have been reckless.Whether war was the appropriate response or not, we are certainly all better off having that uranium used for peaceful purposes, producing electricity in Canada rather than adding to the proliferation of nuclear threats in the explosive Mideast.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)