“In the course of a year after they got full up they would have produced enough plutonium for one or two weapons,” Hayden told reporters after a speech at Georgetown University. . .
U.S. intelligence and administration officials publicly disclosed last week their assessment that Syria was building a covert nuclear reactor with North Korean assistance. . . The Syrian site, they said, was within weeks or months of being operational.
As Glenn Reynolds says, good thing it was destroyed then. But, Mohamed ElBaradei doesn’t see it that way:
The head of the UN nuclear monitoring agency on Friday criticized the US for not giving his organization intelligence information sooner on what Washington says was a nuclear reactor in Syria being built secretly by North Korea.
IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei also chastised Israel for bombing the site seven months ago, in a statement whose strong language reflected his anger at being kept out of the picture for so long. . .
“The director general views the unilateral use of force by Israel as undermining the due process of verification that is at the heart of the nonproliferation regime,” it said.
In full knowledge that the reactor would have produced two bombs in a year, ElBaradei is still against the Israeli operation. I think we can safely say that the IAEA is fundamentally unserious. To them, “nonproliferation” isn’t about preventing proliferation, it’s about verifying proliferation. Hmm, I wonder why we and Israel weren’t hurrying to give them our classified intelligence.
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