Washington shut down a Pentagon-run website this week after it was found to contain Iraqi documents with technical instructions for constructing a nuclear weapon, officials confirmed Friday.
The site, launched in March to let the public help sort through roughly 48,000 boxes of Arabic documents seized during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, had posted materials that weapons experts described as a practical guide to building an atomic bomb. One document alone ran 51 pages, including 18 pages on bomb design.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said intelligence director John Negroponte was reviewing the Arabic-language material for anything that could aid efforts to build weapons of mass destruction.
The International Atomic Energy Agency had complained to Washington the previous week about the postings. UN arms control officials had raised similar concerns earlier in the year about nerve-agent production details also appearing on the site. Despite a June warning to the Security Council from a UN weapons inspection official, the nuclear documents were posted in September.
The New York Times, which first reported the story, noted that the nuclear materials matched documents shown to the UN Security Council in 2002, though that earlier presentation had been heavily edited to remove sensitive weapons information.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this wire report, first published in November 2006, in its own words.