Goddamn. If you think the 380 tons of missing explosives are scary now, try putting it in context with this Reuters article from ten days ago :

Nuclear material taken by experts not looters, say diplomats

October 16, 2004

The removal of Iraq’s mothballed nuclear facilities took about a year and was carried out by experts with heavy machinery and demolition equipment, diplomats close to the United Nations have said.

The UN nuclear watchdog, which monitored Saddam Hussein’s nuclear sites before the US-led invasion last year, told the UN Security Council this week that equipment and materials that could be used to make atomic weapons had been vanishing from Iraq but neither Baghdad nor Washington had noticed.

“This process carried on at least through 2003 … and probably into 2004, at least in early 2004,” a Western diplomat close to the International Atomic Energy Agency said.

US, British and Iraqi officials have downplayed the disappearance of the equipment, saying it was part of widespread looting after the March 2003 invasion, which the US, Britain and Australia said was to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.

However, several diplomats close to the nuclear agency said on Thursday that this was not the result of haphazard looting.

They said the removal of this dual-use equipment – which until the war was tagged and closely monitored by the agency to ensure that it was not being used in a weapons program – was planned and executed by people who knew what they were doing.

“We’re talking about dozens of sites being dismantled,” one diplomat said. “Large numbers of buildings [were] taken down, warehouses were emptied and removed. This would require heavy machinery, demolition equipment. This is not something that you’d do overnight.”

Diplomats in Vienna say the agency fears these facilities, part of a pre-1991 covert nuclear weapons program, could have been sold to a country or militants seeking nuclear weapons.

Among the sites stripped were a precision manufacturing plant at Umm Al Marik, a site connected with nuclear weapons activities at Al Qa Qaa, and an engineering facility at Badr.

This wasn’t looted, it was carefully dismantled for a year. For an administration that mined the aluminum tubes for all they were worth, you’d think they would have done something to guard all the dual-use technologies. I was a doubter before, but I’m really starting to think the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud. And if that ever happens, we all know whose criminal negligence made our worst nightmares more likely.