*EPF104 10/25/2004
White House Report, October 25; Iraq, IAEA
(Missing weapons cache not a nuclear proliferation risk, White House says) (360)

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said that a recent cache of munitions reported missing to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) does not pose a nuclear proliferation risk and that many similar caches have already been destroyed.

When the White House was informed of the missing munitions, the first priority "was to make sure that this wasn't a nuclear proliferation risk, which it is not," he said. "These are conventional high explosives that we are talking about," McClellan told reporters on October 25 at a press briefing aboard Air Force One.

Iraq's interim government told the IAEA on October 10 that approximately 350 metric tons of high explosives were missing from Al Qaqaa in Iraq. IAEA informed the U.S. mission in Vienna, Austria, on October 15, which then conveyed the information to the White House soon after, McClellan said.

He said that according to the Duelfer report, presented to the U.S. Senate by U.S. arms inspector Charles Duelfer, as of mid-September more than 243,000 tons of munitions have been destroyed since Operation Iraqi Freedom. Coalition forces have cleared and reviewed 10,033 caches of munitions and another 163,000 tons of munitions have been secured and will soon be destroyed.

"There were a number of priorities at the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom. And munitions... were literally spread throughout the country," McClellan said.

The munitions were reported missing sometime after April 9, 2003, McClellan said, when the United States was "still involved in major military action." He said that since these caches were subject to IAEA monitoring, the Iraqi interim government reported to IAEA that they were missing. The sites now are the responsibility of Iraqi forces, McClellan said.

The president, he said, is determined that "we get to the bottom of this," and the Pentagon has directed the multinational forces and the Iraqi Survey Group to investigate the matter further.

"I would urge you not to speculate," McClellan said. "We're looking into it to find out exactly what happened to them."

(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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