Hans Blix
Hans Blix
Hans Martin Blix; born 28 June 1928) is a Swedish diplomat and politician for the Liberal People's Party. He was Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairsand later became the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. As such, Blix was the first Western representative to inspect the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union on site, and led the agency response to them. Blix was also the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission from March...
NationalitySwedish
ProfessionDiplomat
Date of Birth28 June 1928
CountrySweden
The world has gotten so interwoven.
The U.N. is much more than the case of Iraq.
Like I said, I'm more worried long term about the environmental issues then the use of arms.
So interviews are a valuable tool, but under certain circumstances they'd be more valuable than others.
The inspections started in 1991, right after the Gulf War. One of the conditions for the ceasefire was that Iraq had to do away with all of its weapons of mass destruction - biological, chemical and nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.
The recent inspection find in the private home of a scientist of a box of some 3,000 pages of documents, much of it relating to the laser enrichment of uranium support a concern that has long existed that documents might be distributed to the homes of private individuals. ...we cannot help but think that the case might not be isolated and that such placements of documents is deliberate to make discovery difficult and to seek to shield documents by placing them in private homes.
The nerve agent VX is one of the most toxic ever developed. 13,000 chemical bombs were dropped by the Iraqi Air Force between 1983 and 1988, while Iraq has declared that 19,500 bombs were consumed during this period. Thus, there is a discrepancy of 6,500 bombs. The amount of chemical agent in these bombs would be in the order of about 1,000 tonnes.
I did not think so at first. But the US is so incredibly dependent on oil, that they wanted to secure oil in case competition on the world market becomes too hard.
They have been saying for a long time that Iraq made an effort to import active uranium, and my colleague demonstrated the other day that they came to the conclusion that it was a fake document that everybody is relying upon.
Unlike South Africa, which decided on its own to eliminate its nuclear weapons and welcomed inspection as a means of creating confidence in its disarmament, Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance-not even today-of the disarmament, which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.
I don't think there would have been any inspection but for outside pressure, including U.S. forces,
how fast one can proceed with the key remaining disarmament tasks.
In the Middle Ages when people were convinced there were witches they certainly found them. This is a bit risky,
The document had been sitting with the CIA and their U.K. counterparts for a long while, and they had not discovered it, ... And I think it took the IAEA a day to discover that it was a forgery.