In message , Chad Irby
writes
In article ,
"Paul J. Adam" wrote:

Let's - for the sake of simplicity - assume the munitions and facilities
have a trustworthy date stamp, however ascertained. Hard to do, but it
simplifies the terms.

1998 and earlier, I'm willing to accept a few (call it three, offhand)
"WME stockpiles" that are - for a rule of thumb - a pallet or less of
shells, 122mm rockets, or precursors each.

...that could be found, accidentally, by militias? When there are
*millions* of similar pallets of conventional weapons floating around in
Iraq right now?

Yep. Note that this was apparently employed in a standard roadside IED,
as if it was just an ordinary HE shell - about as suboptimal an
employment as you can get, if you assume the insurgents knew what they
had.

The math is way against you here. Literally millions-to-one odds.

Thousands-to-one odds, anyway. The existence of that round is a pretty
good fact: so is the absence of any source for it, or any stockpile of
its brothers and sisters.

On the other hand, if there were a lot of unreported and uncatalogued
chemical weapons in the mix, you'd have a much better chance of someone
turning up one or two out of a random ammo dump. Which is what seems to
have happened.

Trouble is, that doesn't say "significant organised and controlled
stockpile", it just says "bad bookkeeping".

--
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
Julius Caesar I:2

Paul J. Adam MainBoxatjrwlynch[dot]demon{dot}co(.)uk