TY - JOUR
AU - Hecht, Gabrielle
AB -  I In October 2002, George W. Bush claimed that Saddam Hussein had “recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Pressed for details, his administration cited CIA intelligence that Iraq had tried to purchase 500 tons of uranium from Niger. Skepticism mounted, with the CIA itself expressing doubts about the intelligence. By the 2003 State of the Union address, senior officials instead credited the information to British intelligence. But the source mattered less, according to Bush, than the inescapable conclusion: Iraq planned to build nuclear weapons. Since then, both the uranium and the weapons claims have been decisively refuted. In February 2002, the CIA sent former diplomat Joseph Wilson to investigate whether Niger had indeed concluded a deal with Iraq. Wilson found no trace of the alleged sale. When he heard Bush's statement a few months later, he initially assumed that the president meant some other uranium‐producing African nation. Upon realizing that Bush really did mean Niger, an appalled Wilson went public in the New York Times. In an attempt to discredit him, an “anonymous source” from the Bush administration outed Wilson's wife as a CIA operative. Meanwhile, it turned out that the proof that Saddam sought uranium 
TI - Nuclear Ontologies
JF - Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory
DO - 10.1111/j.1467-8675.2006.00404.x
DA - 2006-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/wiley/nuclear-ontologies-ZKV67StOhE
SP - 320
EP - 331
VL - 13
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -