Iraq Watch Update: A sarin bomb is found

On May 18, the Washington Post reported that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing the deadly nerve gas sarin was found at the side of a road by a U.S. military convey in Baghdad. The bomb detonated before it could be disabled, and two U.S. soldiers suffered minor injuries from exposure to the chemical agent. The shell was designed to release the sarin gas through a binary reaction after being fired from an artillery piece. The persons who rigged the bomb probably did not know the shell contained sarin and treated it as an explosive, which greatly reduced its potency.

Most experts believe the shell was left over from Saddam Hussein's pre-1991 weapon arsenal, which was aimed at Iran. Thus, while the discovery does not prove the existence of stockpiles of mass destruction weapons, it raises the possibility that more sarin-filled shells remain in Iraq. These weapons could be found and used by insurgents, who may take better advantage of their deadly potential in the future.

In addition to the risk from poison gas, the U.S. occupation is also having difficulty securing other Iraqi weapons. According to a recent letter from the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iraq has begun to leak nuclear-related material and equipment. On April 11, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei informed the U.N. Security Council that equipment and even entire buildings have been removed from Iraqi sites that his agency had once monitored. He wrote that "large quantities of scrap, some of it contaminated, have been transferred out of Iraq" and were showing up elsewhere. According to the Washington Post, some nuclear-related equipment and a small number of missile engines were smuggled to European scrap yards for recycling.

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On March 30, the Special Advisor to the CIA's Iraq Survey Group (ISG), Charles Duelfer, delivered an interim report on his investigation of Iraq's weapon capabilities to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Duelfer said he was looking into the intentions of Saddam Hussein's regime: "...what Saddam ordered, what his ministers ordered, and how the plans fit together." Duelfer said Saddam's regime had plans to sanitize sensitive sites on as little as 15 minutes notice. He also said the ISG had uncovered new information about dual-use facilities that could have produced biological and chemical agents quickly, giving Iraq a "breakout" capability.

Duelfer said he did not know how long the weapons hunt would take. He described the reluctance of Iraqi weapon experts to speak freely as a central impediment to the investigation, and said that the usefulness of collected documents was limited by the linguistic capabilities of his staff to translate them.

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In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in January, Kay said that although Iraq violated U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 by failing to report all of its weapon activities, it is "...highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed militarized chemical and biological weapons" in Iraq before the March 2003 invasion. He estimated that U.S. inspectors had already found "...85 percent of the major elements of the Iraqi program." Still, Kay said there would always be "an unresolvable ambiguity" about Iraq's weapons, largely because of the failure to secure the country after the U.S. occupation. He also maintained that Iraq hid an active ballistic missile program and tried to restart its nuclear weapon program in 2000 and 2001.

This update has plenty of good information, including a summary of Kay's findings and a list of apprehended Iraqi weapon experts, and the programs they worked on.