[captainblacksmith]

I am so sick of hearing this "sophisticated equipment used to manufacture nuclear weapons, and other things".

They are talking about low tolerance milling machines. There are companies in every industrialized city in the world that will do this for you. They are listed in the yellow pages. Give them a spec for a dumb metal flange part thing you want, and they will mill it and FedEx you the part back.

Everyone wants low tolerance parts (.1 mm, or whatever) because that makes the thing you are building generally have a higher quality (golf cart, sewing machine, washing machine, etc). Any metal shop would love to have one of these $1 million machines for a black market $50,000; which is why they were looted!

Read the New York Times article carefully. They have no evidence whatsoever that the stolen devices were not some milling machines and screwdrivers - THINGS USED TO PRODUCE NUCLEAR WEAPONS!!??!!!!

I can just imagine these NYT reporters yelling this stuff while they write the article.

[Ostlandr]

So why do you need a special permit to ship stuff like this out of the US?
Yeah, modern CAD/CAM machine tools are as good as the stuff used to make the bombs that we dropped on Japan. But you still can't build something like a nuke or a jet engine or a rocket motor without this type of sophisticated tooling- the same kind France and Germany are selling to anybody with the coin.
Saddam took a page out of Joe Stalin's book and disassembled his WMD factories and moved them out of harm's way.

[LauraleeBraswell]

""
Read the New York Times article carefully. They have no evidence whatsoever that the stolen devices were not some milling machines and screwdrivers - THINGS USED TO PRODUCE NUCLEAR WEAPONS!!??!!!!"""

Too many double negatives, cannot process this information.

[SevenMinusOne]

I am so sick of hearing this "sophisticated equipment used to manufacture nuclear weapons, and other things". They are talking about low tolerance milling machines. There are companies in every industrialized city in the world that will do this for you. They are listed in the yellow pages. Give them a spec for a dumb metal flange part thing you want, and they will mill it and FedEx you the part back. Everyone wants low tolerance parts (.1 mm, or whatever) because that makes the thing you are building generally have a higher quality (golf cart, sewing machine, washing machine, etc). Any metal shop would love to have one of these $1 million machines for a black market $50,000; which is why they were looted!

Exactly right -

[RinaseaofDs]

It's hard to loot something like this unless you have the equipment to trasport it. On top of that, the 'metal shop' that has one of these can't exactly advertise the fact in the yellow pages.

[El Gato]

Everyone wants low tolerance parts (.1 mm, or whatever) because that makes the thing you are building generally have a higher quality (golf cart, sewing machine, washing machine, etc)

No they don't. Low tolerances generally make for more expensive machining and thus more expensive parts. You can get back some of that by a reduction of "fitting" during assembly and make make the basic design easier. OTOH, most Soviet military equipment was designed to use high tolerance parts, and to function with very loose fitting parts.

[AFPhys]

The first paragraph of the story from the NYT:

" Baghdad - In the weeks after Baghdad fell in April 2003, looters systematically dismantled and removed tons of machinery from Saddam Hussein's most important weapons installations, including some with high-precision equipment capable of making parts for nuclear arms, a senior Iraqi official said this week in the government's first extensive comments on the looting. "

It sounds like this is NOT the standard milling machine you find in the local yellow pages - but rather "HIGH PRECISION EQUIPMENT" - sounds to me, after READING THE STORY, that NewsMax has it right, and the FACT that these machines were at nuclear, missile, chemical AND biological laboratories (as stated IN THE STORY) gives rise to reasonable questions as to what they were making --- and where have those items gone --- along with the disappearance of the machines themselves.