That was the sound of my hand hitting my forehead with about three joules less force than the amount required to cause a skull fracture.

The New York Times has informed us that the Bush Administration has blundered terribly terribly badly by posting Iraqi documents comprising instructions for making nuclear weapons. The documents were seized from Iraqi government sources following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was premised on the blatant, intentional lie that Iraq was pursuing the construction of nuclear weapons.

THWACK!

Sorry. I’ll continue.

The posting of the nuke plans online is considered a major screwup, and highly irresponsible of the United States, because they are pretty complete, “a basic guide to building an atom bomb.” Iraq has been in possession of this information since prior to the first Gulf War and according to the Times, was less than a year away from building a nuclear weapon at that time. Interestingly:

European diplomats said this week that some of those nuclear documents on the Web site were identical to the ones presented to the United Nations Security Council in late 2002, as America got ready to invade Iraq. But unlike those on the Web site, the papers given to the Security Council had been extensively edited, to remove sensitive information on unconventional arms.

In other words, the copies of the plans had been surfaced by IAEA instructors. The plans captured in 2003 in Iraq were part of Iraq’s supposedly dismantled and non-existent nuclear weapons program.

While the Times works hard to explain how this is a catastrophic screwup of the first order – it may have helped Iran or others in building their own bomb – it also explains that this would only tend to help countries that are pretty far along in terms of technology and infrastructure, according to one of the Times’ unnamed sources:

The documents, he added, could perhaps help Iran or other nations making a serious effort to develop nuclear arms, but probably not terrorists or poorly equipped states. The official, who requested anonymity because of his agency’s rules against public comment, called the papers “a road map that helps you get from point A to point B, but only if you already have a car.”

The terrible irony here is that if this is a screwup, it is only a screwup because Iraq had the know-how, was pretty well able, to build a nuclear weapon, and basically needed only to put together the gear and fissible (fusionable?) material to do so.

If the release of this document is a huge threat, it’s because Iraq had the real know-how to put together nuclear weapons (and the ability to pass that know-how on to others).

This would tend to undercut the anti-war and NY Times’ own argument that the nuclear threat posed by Iraq was a complete nullity.

I don’t know how close Iraq was to reactivating a nuclear program in full, but knowing that they were sitting on plans (dispersed among several different documents) to build nuclear weapons 12 years after they agreed to destroy their nuclear weapons program, bolsters Bush’s argument in 2002. The substance of that argument, which I remember quite clearly, was that we do not know where Iraq sits in the nuclear development life cycle because they will not allow inspectors access to many suspect sites, and engage in blatant, obvious intentional deception of inspectors, making effective inspection impossible, and that we cannot take a risk that they build nuclear weapons and pass them on to rogue elements. There is much uncertainty in drawing the conclusion that they would have done so were Saddam Hussein not overthrown. However, the anti-war movement’s claim that the entire invasion was utterly fraudulent and that the weapons program had been destroyed is disproven by this NY Times article. The bomb plans had not been destroyed; the blueprints were merely dispersed. It begs the question: was the same dispersal plan followed with the technology for making nuclear weapons? The uncovery of centrifuge parts buried in the back yard of a top Iraqi nuclear physicist makes me think so.