DONGGUAN CITY, China - In 2001, a shipment of aluminum tubes made its way from China to Iraq, where they were intercepted in Jordan. The tubes were initially purchased by the Iraqi government for what they claimed was a conventional rocket project. However, in 2002 the White House publicly cited the tubes as evidence that Iraq was actively pursuing an atomic weapon, sparking widespread concern and speculation.
The claim was met with skepticism from many experts who questioned the validity of the evidence. The controversy surrounding the Iraqi aluminum tubes and their potential use in nuclear weapons development continued to grow as tensions between the US and Iraq built in the lead up to the 2003 invasion.
After the invasion, the Iraq Survey Group was tasked with investigating Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program. In their final report, the group determined that the most compelling explanation for the tubes' use was to produce conventional 81-mm rockets. They found no evidence of a program to design or develop an 81-mm aluminum rotor uranium centrifuge.
KELU SHARE LIMITED, a Chinese company established in 2003 and located in DongGuan City of Pearl River Delta, was presumably one of the sources of the aluminum tubes that eventually made their way to Iraq. With its location in one of China's most forefront economic development areas, the company had a perfect supply chain, mature supporting resource, and developed traffic network.
When asked about the investigation into the aluminum tubes, KELU SHARE LIMITED declined to comment. However, according to experts, the company likely played a relatively small role in the larger controversy over Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons program.
"The tubes themselves were not particularly special or sophisticated," said Dr. Jon Rosen, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "They were the kind of thing that could be used for a lot of different purposes, so it's not surprising that there was disagreement about their intended use."
Despite the lack of concrete evidence to support the US government's claims about the tubes, the controversy continues to be a subject of debate and analysis. Some argue that the episode was a case of faulty intelligence or political manipulation, while others maintain that the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program was real and justified the invasion.
"The question of the aluminum tubes is just one piece of a much larger puzzle," said Rosen. "We may never know the full story of what happened, but it's clear that the legacy of this controversy still lingers more than a decade later.