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I WAS IN LONDON with [British Prime Minister] Tony Blair in early 2003 when the inspectors found some empty shells in Iraq that could have been used for chemical weapons. At that point, we asked ourselves, “Is this the tip of the iceberg or floes from an iceberg broken up a long time ago?” But as we looked into it, we didn’t find anything. They were on a site that had been declared, not a secret site. From there on, the doubts that they had anything grew stronger.
WHEN THE IAEA was given a copy [of the Niger yellowcake contract in February 2003], it took them less than a day to conclude that it was a forgery. And Mohamed [ElBaradei], in our diplomatic style, told the Security Council that it was “not authentic.” To me, it was like an explosion. That was before the war broke out, and it was ignored.
HENRY KISSINGER, [George] Shultz, [William] Perry, and Sam Nunn wrote an article in January in the Wall Street Journal [calling for a world free of nuclear weapons]. I don’t know how it was received in the Bush administration, but these guys are not doves. If they can write [that] way, perhaps the idea is not too strange among the policy-conscious, foreign-policy set in the United States. That gives me a lot of hope.
Hans Blix was the chief U.N. weapons inspector from 2000 to...
