Washington, May 04: A specially trained US defence department team sent to survey a major Iraqi radioactive waste repository have found the site heavily looted and said it was impossible to tell whether nuclear materials were missing.
The survey, conducted by a US special forces detachment and eight nuclear experts from a pentagon office yesterday, appeared to offer fresh evidence that the war has dispersed the country's most dangerous technologies beyond anyone's knowledge or control, The Washington Post reported today.
The nuclear plunder at the Baghdad nuclear research facility is the second that the authorities have come across since the end of the war and they cannot rule out the possibility that deadly materials had been stolen, the report said.
The facility stored industrial and medical wastes along with spent reactor fuel. Though not suitable to produce a fission bomb, the highest-energy isotopes here, including cesium and cobalt, have been sought by terrorists interested in using conventional explosives to scatter radioactive dust.
However, the pentagon team said it was impossible to determine what may have been removed - by unknowing looters, by knowledgeable thieves bent on black-market trade or by former Iraqi officials seeking to conceal evidence of banned weapons programmes.
In all, seven sites associated with Iraq's nuclear programme have been visited by the pentagon's "special nuclear programs" teams since the war ended last month. None was found to be intact, though it remains unclear what materials – if any - had been removed.
Bureau Report
