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Comment by jhayward | Hacker News Reader

US and S. Korean officials estimate that North Korea has about 60 nuclear weapons, and can manufacture about 6 per year at present.

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US officials also estimated there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

It was only declassified in 2015, but WMDs were discovered in Iraq circa 2005 by Operations Avarice: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_des.... There are counterarguments against the validity of Operation Avarice’s discoveries in justifying the Iraq War, although I admittedly don’t know much about the topic.

I feel like people selling left over devices from the Iran-Iraq war was reported in the media well before 2015.

I hadn’t noticed they were from the Iran-Iraq war, thank you for pointing that out.

Right, it's like oh Reagan gave them "WMDs" in the 80s, so we know they have "WMDs".

TBF there had been a programme. It was defunct, and the evidence of continuance was weak, and it was a totally manufactured crisis, but they had been on the hunt. In no way does this justify the war, and subsequent events.

> evidence of continuance was weak

That's a funny way of saying that we had interviews from the general that ordered the destruction of the program that all WMD had been destroyed after the Iran-Iraq war.[1]

I'd add that counter-evidence of continuance was strong if you're going to include that at all.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9509/iraq_defector/kamel_transcript...

I'm not sure why you would consider a interview with an Iraqi General strong evidence. Either way while I agree that the US claims were fabricated, he was also demonstrably incorrect in claiming that there were none

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middlee...

Except North Korea blew up their mountain base housing them.

No, it didn't. They don't store their nukes in the test tunnels.

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