BUSH'S MUSHROOM CLOUD

If we face nuclear terror, it's entirely likely that George W. Bush is to blame:

Nuclear material taken by experts not looters, say diplomats

The removal of Iraq's mothballed nuclear facilities took about a year and was carried out by experts with heavy machinery and demolition equipment, diplomats close to the United Nations have said.

The UN nuclear watchdog, which monitored Saddam Hussein's nuclear sites before the US-led invasion last year, told the UN Security Council this week that equipment and materials that could be used to make atomic weapons had been vanishing from Iraq but neither Baghdad nor Washington had noticed.

"This process carried on at least through 2003 ... and probably into 2004, at least in early 2004," a Western diplomat close to the International Atomic Energy Agency said.

US, British and Iraqi officials have downplayed the disappearance of the equipment, saying it was part of widespread looting after the March 2003 invasion, which the US, Britain and Australia said was to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.

However, several diplomats close to the nuclear agency said on Thursday that this was not the result of haphazard looting.

They said the removal of this dual-use equipment - which until the war was tagged and closely monitored by the agency to ensure that it was not being used in a weapons program - was planned and executed by people who knew what they were doing.

"We're talking about dozens of sites being dismantled," one diplomat said. "Large numbers of buildings [were] taken down, warehouses were emptied and removed. This would require heavy machinery, demolition equipment. This is not something that you'd do overnight."

Diplomats in Vienna say the agency fears these facilities, part of a pre-1991 covert nuclear weapons program, could have been sold to a country or militants seeking nuclear weapons.

Among the sites stripped were a precision manufacturing plant at Umm Al Marik, a site connected with nuclear weapons activities at Al Qa Qaa, and an engineering facility at Badr.

--Sydney Morning Herald

I posted the whole thing because it's behind a registration firewall, and because it makes me absolutely furious. I'm a Manhattanite -- if a terrorist wants to kill people with a nuclear weapon, there's a better-than-average chance that I'm going to die and so are a lot of people I care about. And if that happens, the only satisfaction I'll have is knowing that history might damn George W. Bush for all time as the incompetent who allowed it to happen.