dirges wrote:
Is this any different then the anthrax that has been lost in the US. It can float into the wrong hands just like any WMD. As far as the shell is concerned we need to wait for confermation first, and find where it came from. We dont even know if it was Iraqi made, it could be a left over from another country smuggled in, anything is possible until it has been analyzed.
/shrug
Yeah. I suppose so. There are differences though. You lose quite a bit of credibility that something was "accidentally lost" when you've used said weapons multiple times in the past, then deny having them anymore, and then one shows up, unlabled, 12 years later. As opposed to an "official" defense research lab, operating under the restrictions placed on the use and research of bio weapons like Anthrax.
The point is that they are not supposed to have "any" chemical weapons at this point. Not "just a few", or even "one". After all, they had 12 years to locate and notify the UN of any weapons they found that had chemical warheads in them. We were not under UN resolution at the time...
Of course we need to wait for confirmation and not jump to any conclusions. I'm just looking at the odds here. If it does turn out that this was a Sarin gas warhead, then there's a pretty nasty set of probabilities here. We have to assume that the people who rigged this thing had some access to some store of weapons. They could have come from anywhere. But what are the odds that this one happened to be the *only* one with a sarin gas warhead?
There's a rule that scientists use when considering probabilities (usually when there's not enough data to actually make any really accurate estimate): Nature never does something just once. Same goes with human actions. Whether that warhead was in whatever storage area these guys got it from by accident or design is irrelevant. If there was one warhead of that type available for use, odds are pretty good there are more.
That's the real scare of this situation. What if some group of Iraqi insurgents found a stockpile of unmarked shells hidden in some basement somewhere? What if this was where someone at some point in the past hid a bunch of chemical warheads. Heck. Who cares if it was Saddam, or one of his sons, or some minister hoping to use them for his own purposes, or they just got lost and forgotten there. It doesn't matter. What does matter is that if that's the case, and there are more of those where they got the first, they now know what kind of weapons they are.
I would gladly have us never find a single substantiated WMD in Iraq if that meant that none of the insurgents had access to such weapons. I'm more then willing to argue on this forum that we were justified to enter Iraq even if we didn't find WMD in country. I'm not going to be overjoyed if our "proof" comes in the form of a massive gassing attack on our soldiers in Iraq.