Saddam's nuclear stockpile removed from Iraq

The Associated Press reports the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program -- a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium -- has been removed from Iraq:

The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" — the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment — was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.

Four years ago, Douglas Hanson crunched the numbers and concluded Saddam's huge uranium hoard was large enough to make more than 140 nuclear weapons:

You have a warehouse containing 500 tons of natural uranium; you need 25 kilograms of U235 to build one weapon. How many nuclear weapons can you build? The answer is 142.

According to Investor's Business Daily, Saddam acquired most of this uranium before 1991. That he still had it in 2003, when U.S. troops found the stuff is another failure for the International Atomic Energy Agency ("IAEA"). The IAEA knew about the yellowcake in the 1990s, but did not force Saddam to get rid of it.

Saddam held onto 550 tons of yellowcake for more than a decade as he tried to wait out the U.N. sanctions and restart his WMD programs.

The huge stash of yellowcake is further evidence that President Bush made the right call when he decided to remove the tyrant Saddam. Saddam's stockpile also further refutes the partisan Joe Wilson inaccurate attack on the President's use of the now infamous 16 words.

FactCheck.org concluded President Bush got it right in his 2003 State of the Union address:

A British intelligence review released July 14 calls Bush’s 16 words “well founded.”

A separate report by the US Senate Intelligence Committee said July 7 that the US also had similar information from “a number of intelligence reports,” a fact that was classified at the time Bush spoke.

Ironically, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who later called Bush’s 16 words a “lie,” supplied information that the Central Intelligence Agency took as confirmation that Iraq may indeed have been seeking uranium from Niger.