If you were to read only the headlines, it’d be easy to believe that the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) has managed to do what the United States failed to over a decade ago: find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction materials. What you’d miss, however, is the reporting beneath those headlines which explains that the chemicals and uranium that ISIS has seized aren’t just less than weapons-quality, they’re for the most part completely unusable.
Reuters reported on Wednesday that the Iraqi government had informed the United Nations that the terrorist group had seized “nuclear materials” from a university in Mosul, the city that kicked-off its string of military successes in Northern Iraq. In all, the group managed to capture around 88 pounds worth of uranium compounds, according to a letter from Iraq’s U.N. ambassador to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon. A quick search of Twitter on the story finds comments from conservatives convinced that somehow the militants of ISIS had proved that Saddam Hussein was in fact carrying out the nuclear program that the Bush administration used as the first justification for the invasion of Iraq. But it turns out that while the headline reading “Iraq tells U.N. that ‘terrorist groups’ seized nuclear materials” is quite provocative and easily used to slam the Obama administration, the reality of the reporting is much more mundane.
The capture was confirmed on Thursday in a release from the International Atomic Energy Association, which said that the nuclear watchdog is “aware of the notification from Iraq and is in contact to seek further details.” But it turns out that the “uranium compounds” seized are of little to no threat to the general population. Spokesperson Gill Tudor continued on to say that the organization believes “the material involved is low-grade and would not present a significant safety, security or nuclear proliferation risk. Nevertheless, any loss of regulatory control over nuclear and other radioactive materials is a cause for concern.”
When the IAEA says that the uranium captured is “low-grade,” they mean that the radioactive material has not been further enriched to a point that it can be used in a nuclear weapon. While lower enriched uranium can possibly used in a “dirty bomb” — a weapon where conventional explosives are used to spread radioactive material across a wide area — that doesn’t appear to be a concern in this situation either. In a follow-up story, Reuters found the same thing in speaking with Olli Heinonen, a former IAEA chief inspector. “You cannot make a nuclear explosive from this amount, but all uranium compounds are poisonous,” Heinonen told Reuters. “This material is also not ‘good’ enough for a dirty bomb.”
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/07/10/3458691/still-no-wmd-iraq/
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