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Yellowcake is uranium ore that has been milled to produce a pure form of the substance known as Uranium Oxide. Further processes, such as conversion and enrichment, are required to make the yellowcake suitable for use as nuclear fuel in a reactor or for use in a nuclear weapon. Interestingly, a quantity of depleted uranium was also found at Tuwaitha. This implies that some enrichment processes occurred on-site, as depleted uranium is the natural byproduct of the enrichment process.

In addition to the yellowcake, approximately 300 tons of radioisotopes for industrial and medical uses were stored at primarily Site B. These materials, numbering over 1000 radioactive items retrieved from the site, included Cesium-137 and Cobalt-60. Both are extremely radioactive substances that are ideal for use in Radiological Dispersal Devices (RDD), or 'dirty bombs.'

There are also three key facilities on the Al-Tuwaitha reservation that are rarely mentioned in media accounts of the transfer. First, there is the French reactor at Site B, better known as Osirak, which was destroyed by the Israelis in 1981 in Operation Opera. The second facility is the Russian built reactor at Site A, destroyed by the US in Gulf War I in 1991. The third facility is a fuel fabrication plant at Site D, also destroyed in 1991. All three facilities have never been rebuilt. All spent fuel or fresh fuel was sent back to the country of origin after Gulf War I.

DOE removed the last remnants of yellowcake from Iraq (which means there was more than just that 550 metric tons), where it was sitting under seal, guarded by official-looking UN masking tape and an IAEA whose effectiveness is, at best, debatable.

The point being that, had the US followed prevailing wisdom and lifted sanctions on Iraq prior to 911 (as many had been proposing), this yellowcake would have been "returned" to the Iraqi government, where it would be put to use in ways that are perhaps hinted at by the discovery, on the site, of depleted uranium, a by-product of uranium enrichment. Which, it seems to me, suggests that the technology to enrich uranium was available to Saddam at some point - the logical corollary to that observation being that leaving stockpiles of "harmless" yellowcake lying around a country that had flouted UN directives consistently enough to warrant a US invasion was probably not the best course of action for those western countries against whom Al Qaeda had declared war.

Similarly - and even if we bracket the possibility that Saddam could ever effectively reconstitute a nuclear program (with the AQ Khan revelations, I'm not sure how one can posit such a thing as a technological blackout, but then, what do I know…) - the fact that Al Qaeda and its affiliate groups were active in Iraq presented the possibility that they could have acquired some of this material, and used it not as a way to launch a nuclear holocaust against the west, but rather to launch attacks intended to terrify and to alter our way of life, which, as they themselves have maintained, has been one of their primary goals.