My father had a hypothesis about WMDs in Iraq: Saddam’s underlings were corrupt and “exaggerated” the amount of chemical weapons they had produced. After all, anyone who admitted that he couldn’t make the quantity he promised was going to be in big trouble. Also, if you say you made 100 units of chemical weapons but only made 50, you get paid for making 100 but only had to spend enough money to make 50, and you get to steal the difference. Again, nobody is going to admit to stealing from Saddam, so when it came time to destroy the 100 units that existed on paper, the inspectors would only find the 50 that actually existed, and there would be 50 more units “missing” that nobody could admit didn’t exist in the first place.
For some weapons that might indeed have been the case but when the weapons looking the same as conventional weapons it’s not far fetched that some really went missing.
After all even the big powers misplaced up to 50 nuclear warheads during the cold war.
My father had a hypothesis about WMDs in Iraq: Saddam’s underlings were corrupt and “exaggerated” the amount of chemical weapons they had produced. After all, anyone who admitted that he couldn’t make the quantity he promised was going to be in big trouble. Also, if you say you made 100 units of chemical weapons but only made 50, you get paid for making 100 but only had to spend enough money to make 50, and you get to steal the difference. Again, nobody is going to admit to stealing from Saddam, so when it came time to destroy the 100 units that existed on paper, the inspectors would only find the 50 that actually existed, and there would be 50 more units “missing” that nobody could admit didn’t exist in the first place.
For some weapons that might indeed have been the case but when the weapons looking the same as conventional weapons it’s not far fetched that some really went missing.
After all even the big powers misplaced up to 50 nuclear warheads during the cold war.