UN in Dark About Looted Iraq Dirty Bomb Material
Date: 17-Jul-03
Country: AUSTRIA
Author: Louis Charbonneau
The U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced this in a report sent to the U.N. Security Council Tuesday about its limited inspection of the Location C storage facility outside the Tuwaitha nuclear research complex near Baghdad.
In the post-war chaos of Iraq, looters broke into Location C and at least six other nuclear sites in Iraq and emptied hundreds of containers of nuclear material. Most of the material and containers were recovered.
"The quantity and type of uranium compounds dispersed are not sensitive from a proliferation point of view," IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei wrote in the report. ElBaradei said at least 22 pounds of low-grade uranium may have been dispersed and called for authorities to recover all of it.
The term "proliferation" refers to the possibility of a country or group using these uranium compounds to make nuclear weapons.
This low-grade natural uranium would only be dangerous if ingested and would be of little use in a so-called dirty bomb, which could disperse radioactive material over a wide area through a conventional explosion.
But an IAEA spokeswoman said the agency had not been permitted by U.S. occupation authorities to check the status of Tuwaitha's stocks of highly-radioactive cesium-137, cobalt-160 and other materials which could be used in dirty bombs.
"There were around 400 of these radioactive sources stored at Tuwaitha," IAEA's Melissa Fleming said.
Witnesses have said that villagers near Tuwaitha, especially children, have shown symptoms of radiation sickness.
"Any case of radiation sickness would probably be from these highly-radioactive sources, not from the low-grade natural uranium at Location C," Fleming said.
"WHAT IT DOESN'T SAY"
The environmental organization Greenpeace organized its own mission to Iraq to determine the level of contamination of areas around Iraq's looted nuclear sites.
"It's not what the report says but what it doesn't say that is cause for concern," Greenpeace's team leader in Iraq, Mike Townsley, told Reuters in Amsterdam. "What the report doesn't talk about is the other radioactive material, the much more dangerous industrial radiation sources."
"Nobody says these isotopes are still there," he said. "Within one week our mission found three sources of these industrial isotopes. We had access to the community, the IAEA did not."
On June 24, Greenpeace handed over to the U.S. military an abandoned metal canister found in Iraq, which the group said was giving off 10,000 times the normal radiation levels.
The U.S. military would not permit the IAEA to assess the health of the local population and confined the IAEA inspection team's activities to an inventory of only the low-grade uranium at Location C.
The IAEA warned the United States and Britain after their forces took control of Iraq in April that they should secure all Iraq's nuclear facilities to prevent an environmental, medical and humanitarian emergency. The IAEA inspectors did not get to Iraq until early June.
In the report, ElBaradei again called on U.S. and British occupation authorities "to ensure the physical protection and security of the entire nuclear material inventory in Iraq."