1)They already had a Soviet research reactor, which they didn’t and couldn’t use it’s full research abilty due to lack of, sorry, brain(not for being Arabs, but for being without sufficient expertise).
So what? A research reactor is a research reactor. They cannot be used to enrich nuclear material in any appreciable amount of time. Maybe one nuclear weapon in the space of a few decades. It’s a simple question of scale and capability.
2) Iraq, with its oil reservses, needs nuclear energy for peace uses just as much as I need more foreign workers with all the unemployment we have here.
I didn’t say Iraq was never going to develop nuclear weapons. However, Osirak was not going to be useful in such an operation. Even so, the USSR used nuclear power plants for power production even though they had massive oil and coal reserves.
Nuclear power, the scaremongerers aside, is actually quite clean by other practical power standards (the amount of nuclear waste a nuclear power plant produces is miniscule compared to the crap pumped out into the atmosphere by say a coal plant). The chances of a meltdown are also quite minimal in a properly maintained, Western reactor.
3) France offered them a new nuclear fuel called the “karamel” that could have been used to nearly all of the uses of the uranium (I hope I spell it right), except for the use of production of nuclear weapons.
Why would Iraq want this when it had it’s own nuclear material? What they lacked was the infrastructure to enrich it. They never had this infrastructure.
Anyway, it was clear that Iraq was about to use this reactor not only for research.
Many in this forum would agree with me about this, BTW.
It’s irrelevant if “many in this forum” would agree- that’s a fallacious appeal to popularity that has nothing to do with whether it’s true or not. Case in point: in 1300AD many in the world would agree the world was flat.
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