Hans Blix Quotations

I also hear your president say that war is the means of last resort and I think he means that. I met him last autumn and he assured me that they wanted to come through and disarm Iraq by peaceful means, and that's what we are trying to do as hard as we can.

If you take the biological weapons in the United States we still will have perhaps a single individual who was able to make anthrax, dry it, and spread it through the mail and cause terror.

But I would say if the Security Council is only relevant if it agrees with the United States, then we have come a long way in a direction that I do not like very much.

Like I said, I'm more worried long term about the environmental issues then the use of arms.

On big issues like war in Iraq, but in many other issues they simply must be multilateral. There's no other way around. You have the instances like the global warming convention, the Kyoto protocol, when the U.S. went its own way.

What surprises me, what amazes me, is that it seems the military people were expecting to stumble on large quantities of gas, chemical weapons and biological weapons.

I can imagine that the Iraqis undertake the destruction out of fear. If they had denied it, if they had said no, that certainly would have played into the hands of those that would like to take armed action immediately. I have no illusions in that regard.

I found it peculiar that those who wanted to take military action could - with 100 per cent certainty - know that the weapons existed and turn out to have zero knowledge of where they were.

They have been saying for a long time that Iraq made an effort to import active uranium, and my colleague demonstrated the other day that they came to the conclusion that it was a fake document that everybody is relying upon.

Look at the Palestinians with the huge, huge percentage of unemployed. What does that breed? Anyone who's unemployed in the world, you feel there's no meaning and there's a risk that you drift over to something desperate. Yes, we have to tackle the social problems as well.

I think that we have to do our job well, investigate thoroughly and then describe very honestly what we see to the Security Council. And some of the things might please people there and other things may not please the people.

Now the idea about taking people abroad is that if they come over to Cyprus, which we have in mind, and bring their families and would have the possibility to defect after they would be ready to speak their mind, well I hope so.

Even on television, the wavelengths that you use, they have to be distributed between countries.

The country is not a democratic state. Therefore we fear that they might carry a recorder in their pocket or there may be bugs in the walls, and you cannot be absolutely sure that you get a straight testimony.

If public opinion still endorses military action that's one thing, but if they wait maybe it will not. So it's not only impatience, but there are several other factors.

Iraq did not spontaneously opt for disarmament. They did it as part of a ceasefire, so they were forced to do it, otherwise the war might have gone on. So the motivation has been very different.

The inspections started in 1991, right after the Gulf War. One of the conditions for the ceasefire was that Iraq had to do away with all of its weapons of mass destruction - biological, chemical and nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.

The South Africans decided that they would like to prove to the world they did not have any nuclear weapons and their decision was not doubted because it was the end of the Cold War, it was also the end of apartheid.

I don't think that anyone seriously fears that the world can be blown to pieces all together. But what one can fear and rightly so are regional things, like in the Middle East, India, Pakistan, the Korean Peninsula, borders in Africa, etc.

By and large my relations with the US were good.

It was to do with information management. The intention was to dramatise it.

So interviews are a valuable tool, but under certain circumstances they'd be more valuable than others.

The Iraqis are not threatened by the Turks or by the Iranians or by the Saudis and they tell me that these are not weapons of mass destruction, they are weapons of self-destruction.

We know exactly who is going to be there, and the advance team that I am going to lead,

would seem to have only limited practical relevance in the current situation.

There are very many of these missiles and a lot of items that pertain to them, which we had enumerated in our letter. It is a very significant piece of real disarmament.

Many issues have been clarified, and we will continue tomorrow, ... By the end of tomorrow, when we are finished, I hope that we can say a little more than we have done today.

Now we are curious, we are the most curious of all to know, are the Americans and Brits and others going to find some weapons of mass destruction?

But there is some evidence that has been placed on the table that has been put into doubt, like evidence about the aluminum tubes. So the more on the table, the better.

If the Iraqis were to use any chemical weapons, then I think the public opinion around the world would immediately turn against Iraq, and they would say, as well, that the invasion was justified.

What works best as a matter of psychology -- shouting or soft speaking with some leverage? Well I don't know -- my habit is not to shout.

He should not have had them. I asked him how he got them and he would not tell me,

There are still a number of questions, including the question of possible further external assistance to the nuclear program. You don't know what you don't know.

I think it seems ... they are making an effort.

I think it's clear that in March, when the invasion took place, the evidence that had been brought forward was rapidly falling apart,

I think we have to learn what did they have. They say that they will adhere to the Non-Proliferation Treaty for nuclear weapons. They are already party to that treaty, and they have had inspections for years.

I think they lost their patience much too early,

I think the more evidence that is placed on the table, if there is some, the better,

is a disarmament resolution and not an inspection resolution.

Our inspectors had been there, and they had taken a lot of samples, and there was no trace of any chemicals or biological things, ... And the trucks that we had seen were water trucks.

Our role is not to humiliate the Iraqis.

or any other very sensitive thing, we'll say cannot be circulated to anybody.

that could be risky from the point of view of proliferation.

It feels like an intrusion into your integrity in a situation when you are actually on the same side,

We had hoped that it would clarify a lot of issues that remained open since 1998. It did give information about peaceful programs concerning biology and chemistry, but it did not really shed any new evidence from the chemical weapons and biological weapons program.

We are not watching the breaking of toothpicks,

We have not seen a serious effort on the Iraqi side ... or evidence that would clear up the question marks.

The patience that they require for themselves now was not anything that they wanted to give to us,

What we have said we need all the time is the presentation of more evidence -- that they have not been taking the questions seriously which were posed in the report with which they are familiar, and we would like to have responses to those questions,

We want to be serious when we come forward with accusations, as we were when ordering the Iraqis to destroy a very large missile program.

We would like to have clues as to where the United States' and other countries' intelligence feel they know Iraqis are storing weapons of mass destruction, ... Then, we can send in the inspectors.

We would expect them to accept what we have said and to destroy the missiles as we have stated, ... They are to start the destruction by March 1 and we will discuss with them the pace and order.

to seek and present credible evidence for their absence.

We will want to see a lot more (cooperation) this weekend.

We expect them to accept what we have said and destroy the missiles as we have stated, ... They have done so in past always when we have requested so.

The U.N. is much more than the case of Iraq.

It would be inappropriate for me to assume they still have weapons of mass destruction, but at the same time, it would be naive to exclude that possibility,

It would be awkward if we were doing inspections and then a new mandate, with new, changed directives were to arise, ... It would be better have those earlier. My impression is that there is good intensity with talks about that, and we will abide by whatever the council decides.

The situation is tense at the moment, but there is a new opportunity and we are here to provide inspection which is credible.

The things that have happened in the last few days are a bit troubling.

Sorry, but in the chemical sector we can't go that far.

Saddam Hussein has certainly figured himself to be a sort of emperor of Mesopotamia and the leader of the Arab world.

perhaps the most important problem we are facing.

Denying us access would then be like smoke. It's not finding a smoking gun, but finding the smoke. And that would be a very serious matter. If they deny us access we'll report it to the Security Council,

You never get quite down to the bottom of the barrel, but we are much higher than that at the present time. There is quite a lot left in the barrel that could be explained by them. If they have some weapons, if they have some anthrax, they should deliver that.

This does not necessarily mean that such items could not exist. They might. There remain a long list of items unaccounted for, ... But it is not justified to jump to the conclusion that something exists just because it was unaccounted for.

They sort of showered us with letters trying to explain this or that.

They said they had been surprised themselves ... They were in boxes, never opened -- there were bird droppings on them. But of course they should have been declared and destroyed.

It seems to me that they could do things which would change the situation, ... The principal issue is weapons of mass destruction.

I told the council that we hope we will have been through the main part of the document -- which is about 3,000 pages -- by Friday.

they know very well what they should provide. We have not seen it yet.

Exactly what it contains, I cannot tell you. But they have followed up on their promise that it would come,

If there are any obstructions or problems, we will report them,

In the course of these inspections, we have not found any smoking gun.

Inspection is not a game of catch as catch can. Regrettably, the 12,000-page declaration, most of which is a reprint of earlier documents, does not seem to contain any new evidence that will eliminate the questions.

I hope I have seen ... a beginning of taking these remaining disarmament issues more seriously,

In the Middle Ages when people were convinced there were witches they certainly found them. This is a bit risky,

there are people in this administration who say they don't care if the UN sinks under the East river, and other crude things...

Disarmament by war and democracy by occupation are difficult prospects.

There was a very consistent creation of a virtual reality, and eventually it collided with our old-fashioned, ordinary reality.

But in the Middle Ages people were convinced there were witches. They looked for them and they certainly found them.

It's true the Iraqis misbehaved and had no credibility but that doesn't necessarily mean that they were in the wrong.

I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media.

Never humiliate anyone.

For some twenty years the window that opened at the end of the Cold War has been allowed to hang flapping in the wind. It is high time that the five nuclear-weapon states take seriously their commitment to negotiate toward nuclear disarmament.

To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war...I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict.

Negotiations with Iran, especially, will not be easy under any circumstances, but I suspect that they might be somewhat less difficult if the nuclear-weapon states could show that their requests are part of a broader effort to lead the world, including themselves, toward nuclear disarmament. Preventing further proliferation is essential, but it is not a recipe for success to preach to the rest of the world to stay away from the very weapons that nuclear states claim are indispensable to their own security.

We have not found any smoking guns.

International cooperation, multilateralism is indispensable.

The world has gotten so interwoven.

The U.N. is much more than the case of Iraq.

The recent inspection find in the private home of a scientist of a box of some 3,000 pages of documents, much of it relating to the laser enrichment of uranium support a concern that has long existed that documents might be distributed to the homes of private individuals. ...we cannot help but think that the case might not be isolated and that such placements of documents is deliberate to make discovery difficult and to seek to shield documents by placing them in private homes.

The nerve agent VX is one of the most toxic ever developed. 13,000 chemical bombs were dropped by the Iraqi Air Force between 1983 and 1988, while Iraq has declared that 19,500 bombs were consumed during this period. Thus, there is a discrepancy of 6,500 bombs. The amount of chemical agent in these bombs would be in the order of about 1,000 tonnes.

I did not think so at first. But the US is so incredibly dependent on oil, that they wanted to secure oil in case competition on the world market becomes too hard.

Unlike South Africa, which decided on its own to eliminate its nuclear weapons and welcomed inspection as a means of creating confidence in its disarmament, Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance-not even today-of the disarmament, which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and to live in peace.

I don't think there would have been any inspection but for outside pressure, including U.S. forces,

how fast one can proceed with the key remaining disarmament tasks.

The Iraqis have been putting themselves in a position to rejuvenate their weapons-of-mass-destruction programs.

The document had been sitting with the CIA and their U.K. counterparts for a long while, and they had not discovered it, ... And I think it took the IAEA a day to discover that it was a forgery.

The destruction of missiles requested has not yet begun. Iraq could have made full use of the declaration which was submitted on 7 December. It is hard to understand why a number of the measures which are now being taken, could not have been initiated earlier. If they had been taken earlier, they might have borne fruit by now.