Yesterday Josh Marshall wrote he was expecting a lot of followup on that Financial Times article that claimed to have substantiated the Niger/yellow cake uranium debacle. Said he knew a lot he can't say right now.Well, since William Safire prevaricatedwrote about it, Josh decided he could poke all holes in Safire's story without revealing anything.

You can approach this on a different level. Safire would like us to believe the Bush White House, faced last July with a PR catastrophe over the president's use of the Niger uranium claim in the State of the Union address, decided to fold its cards and issue a series of rather abject apologies even though they had this rock-solid intelligence that they could have used to go on the offensive. That make sense to you? Me neither.

This is why I have my doubts about the story, so much that I've been in no rush to read it. But this:

…One premise of the two FT articles was that smugglers were getting uranium from derelict (and thus unguarded and unregulated) mines in Niger to sell to five countries.

Safire mentions three of the alleged countries: Iran, Iraq and Libya. The FT includes the other two: North Korea and China.

On its face, it's not inconceivable that countries seeking nuclear weapons technology like Iran, Iraq, Libya and North Korea would be in the market for illicit supplies of processed uranium.

But China? Last time I checked China is an acknowledged nuclear power and has been for decades. They also have a growing civilian nuclear power program. Perhaps most to the point they have big uranium mines in their own country and a national monopoly company (the China National Nuclear Corporation) charged with the running the mines and the nearby-located processing facilities. The IAEA says the Chinese have the domestic capacity to process 1200 tons of uranium a year.

Now, I don't know the precise needs of Chinese civilian and military nuclear activities. But given their own domestic capabilities, how likely is it that they're going to try to cut a deal with low-rent smugglers to get some uranium from derelict (and thus not very productive) mines in Niger? Does that make sense?