Jam of mass destruction

[ewx]

I've been reading Hans Blix's book on his experiences as head of UNMOVIC.

When asked about the declaration and the difficulties Iraq might have in reporting about so many types of items over such long periods, I said that “producing mustard gas is not like producing marmalade. You keep track of how much you make and what happens to it.”

...and on the next page when discussing the inspection of a presidential site on the Tigris:

In this guesthouse there were no archives, document files or stores of chemical or biological weapons and no sensitive equipment to tag, but there was lots of marmalade in the refrigerators.

I can't help but feel that someone was having a laugh...

(They did find mustard gas shells elsewhere in the same kind of time frame.)

Comments

[kaet.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested in his justification of the former statement. There's incompetence which strikes places like Sellafield where things go "missing" or "appear" on paper: there have been kilograms of Plutonium which are temporarily "lost". There was also the debacle at (nearby) Lords Bridge which was forwards mustard gas depot in WWI. They didn't lose any but it did regularly leak unknown amounts, one vat was mixed with an unknown proportion of benzene (and then exploded), and so on. If you were to ask how much was on-site I'm sure nobody would have known. Then there was the smallpox vial which a mutual friend of ours found in the permafrost of a local research institution only a few years ago (it was whisked away by the CDC).

I think there's almost an instinctive tendency not to write these things down, as that keeps them out of a whole domain of aprehension which is both useful and psychologically instinctive.

Where it could land you in trouble with the international community, with your slightly unhinged immediate superiors (who would be prepared to scapegoat, I'm sure) I don't think it would be at all surprising.

[kaet.livejournal.com]

I should have said the permafrost of a freezer of a local research organisation, of course. Hinxton isn't quite that cold, :).

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Mr Blix may have been optimistic in this matter, yes.

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Damn close, this time of year.