London, July 13: Former head of the UN weapons inspectors Hans Blix has said that British Premier Tony Blair made a "fundamental mistake" in claiming that Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes. "The figure of 45 minutes to deploy weapons of mass destruction seemed "pretty far off the mark," Blix told an English daily in London.
"I think that was a fundamental mistake. I don't know exactly how they calculated this figure of 45 minutes in the dossier of september last year. That seems pretty far off the mark to me," he said.
The claim was made in the government's WMD dossier last September and repeated by the Prime Minister when he presented the document in the House of Commons. Blix said it was theoretically possible to switch in an instant from producing vaccines to producing biological weapons. "But a weapon is ...also about a means of delivery, and it seems to me highly unlikely that there were any means of delivering biological or chemical weapons within 45 minutes," said the former chief UN inspector.
He also said that the British government "overinterpreted" the intelligence they had. A British parliamentary committee last Monday found that the claim "did not warrant the prominence given to it". Bureau Report