Did U.S. intelligence analysts actually “replicate” the mobile biological weapons laboratories that were supposedly deployed by Saddam Hussein, as stated in the Silberman-Robb Commission report?
Arms control expert Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland posed this question earlier this year.
Based on his own investigations, he has now concluded that there was no such replication of the supposed mobile BW labs.
“No mock-up containing the pieces of equipment shown in the drawings appears to have been produced, and no biological agent or simulant was produced.”
“Apparently the drawings [used in Secretary Powell’s 2003 UN presentation] were all that was ever prepared.”
“These self-conceived and self-imagined illustrations were all the ‘evidence’ that the United States government had to give to Secretary of State Powell to place before the United Nations and the world to support the claim that Iraq had mobile biological weapon production platforms…,” Dr. Leitenberg wrote.
See “Further Information Regarding US Government Attribution of a Mobile Biological Production Capacity by Iraq” by Milton Leitenberg, August 2006.
This DOE Office has been achieving DOGE’s stated mission of billion dollar savings for decades. Now government leaders may close its doors.
Direct File redefined what IRS service could look like, with real-time help and data-driven improvements. Let’s apply that bar elsewhere.
At this inflection point, the choice is not between speed and safety but between ungoverned acceleration and a calculated momentum that allows our strategic AI advantage to be both sustained and secured.
Improved detection could strengthen deterrence, but only if accompanying hazards—automation bias, model hallucinations, exploitable software vulnerabilities, and the risk of eroding assured second‑strike capability—are well managed.