http://www.newsmax.com/showinsidecover.shtml?a=2003/1/24/113801
It's no accident that the French, along with Germany, have now lined up in opposition to U.S. plans to use military force to neutralize Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program. Especially since, according to at least one former top Iraqi nuclear scientist, Paris helped Baghdad go nuclear in the first place. According to Dr. Khidir Hamza, who ran Saddam's nuclear bombmaking program in the early 1990's, Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor was built by the French. When the Israelis determined that the reactor's real purpose was to make nuclear weapons, they destroyed it in a 1981 bombing raid. "From the moment Osirak was hit we knew we had to try another method to get the bomb," Dr. Hamza told the Washington Times in Sept. 2002. The year before Dr. Hamza confirmed that the Osirak reactor was never intended to be anything but a nuclear bombmaking plant. "I went to France in 1974 to buy a reactor, as a starting point, for a plutonium bomb," Hamza told the Carneigie Endowment in November 2000. "It was a long-range project. The reactor would be inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); and the French would be there." And even after Osirak was taken out, French assistance was critical to Baghdad's continuing plan to get nuclear weapons. "Just before the Gulf War, the crash program was ongoing to make one bomb from the French fuel," Hamza told the Carniegie group. "People were putting stock into that one bomb," he said. "They were afraid of even testing the bomb, because Iraq testing that one bomb would be like telling the world that we used the French fuel." Dr. Hamza said that in 1990 Saddam ordered him to make a single nuclear device using materials obtained from Paris. "We made a device, actually, minus the core," he told PBS's "Frontline" in Oct. 2001. "And we sat down and did calculations.... We would have had a small -- probably two-to-four kiloton explosion at the time..... But the idea was [that Saddam] wanted it on a missile, and he was mad at us for not making it small enough." Undoubtedly one of the things French diplomats now fear most is that a U.S. invasion of Iraq is likely to confirm Dr. Hamza's account, providing undisputable evidence that Baghdad relied on French assistance to make Iraq's most deadly weapon of mass destruction. xponent Bastards! Maru rob ________________________________ You are a fluke of the universe. You have no right to be here. And whether you can hear it or not, the universe is laughing behind your back. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
