[Peace-discuss] US Nuke find claim in Iraq critiqued

[John Fettig]

On Thu, 2003-04-10 at 23:25, patton paul wrote:
> A few days ago NPR reported an
> unconfirmed claim that the US had found 20 300 mile range missles loaded
> with VX nerve gas or mustard agent.  Does anybody know what became of this
> claim?  Has it been substantiated or refuted?

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993599

This site claims that the missiles were only 20km range.  Most of the
sites that I have run across make it very clear that full tests on the
materials in the rockets have to be run before conclusions are drawn,
and I haven't seen any results of full tests.  It shouldn't be too long
now, as they have the capability to do these tests in Kuwait.

They also mention that the field tests are intentionally
over-sensitive.  They give a lot of false positives.  Rumsfeld, when
asked, said something like "The first reports are almost always wrong". 
So, I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

-- 
John Fettig <jfettig at uiuc.edu>