Hans Blix Quotes

To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war…I’m more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict.

On big issues like war in Iraq, but in many other issues they simply must be multilateral. There’s no other way around. You have the instances like the global warming convention, the Kyoto protocol, when the U.S. went its own way.

But I would say if the Security Council is only relevant if it agrees with the United States, then we have come a long way in a direction that I do not like very much.

But in the Middle Ages people were convinced there were witches. They looked for them and they certainly found them.

So interviews are a valuable tool, but under certain circumstances they’d be more valuable than others.

Now the idea about taking people abroad is that if they come over to Cyprus, which we have in mind, and bring their families and would have the possibility to defect after they would be ready to speak their mind, well I hope so.

Even on television, the wavelengths that you use, they have to be distributed between countries.

They have been saying for a long time that Iraq made an effort to import active uranium, and my colleague demonstrated the other day that they came to the conclusion that it was a fake document that everybody is relying upon.

Look at the Palestinians with the huge, huge percentage of unemployed. What does that breed? Anyone who’s unemployed in the world, you feel there’s no meaning and there’s a risk that you drift over to something desperate. Yes, we have to tackle the social problems as well.

Never humiliate anyone.

I don’t think that anyone seriously fears that the world can be blown to pieces all together. But what one can fear and rightly so are regional things, like in the Middle East, India, Pakistan, the Korean Peninsula, borders in Africa, etc.

I also hear your president say that war is the means of last resort and I think he means that. I met him last autumn and he assured me that they wanted to come through and disarm Iraq by peaceful means, and that’s what we are trying to do as hard as we can.

It was to do with information management. The intention was to dramatise it.

It’s true the Iraqis misbehaved and had no credibility but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they were in the wrong.

International cooperation, multilateralism is indispensable.

I can imagine that the Iraqis undertake the destruction out of fear. If they had denied it, if they had said no, that certainly would have played into the hands of those that would like to take armed action immediately. I have no illusions in that regard.

There was a very consistent creation of a virtual reality, and eventually it collided with our old-fashioned, ordinary reality.

There are people in this administration who say they don’t care if the UN sinks under the East river, and other crude things.

The U.N. is much more than the case of Iraq.

The country is not a democratic state. Therefore we fear that they might carry a recorder in their pocket or there may be bugs in the walls, and you cannot be absolutely sure that you get a straight testimony.

You never get quite down to the bottom of the barrel, but we are much higher than that at the present time. There is quite a lot left in the barrel that could be explained by them. If they have some weapons, if they have some anthrax, they should deliver that.

For some twenty years the window that opened at the end of the Cold War has been allowed to hang flapping in the wind. It is high time that the five nuclear-weapon states take seriously their commitment to negotiate toward nuclear disarmament.

If public opinion still endorses military action that’s one thing, but if they wait maybe it will not. So it’s not only impatience, but there are several other factors.

The inspections started in 1991, right after the Gulf War. One of the conditions for the ceasefire was that Iraq had to do away with all of its weapons of mass destruction – biological, chemical and nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.

I found it peculiar that those who wanted to take military action could – with 100 per cent certainty – know that the weapons existed and turn out to have zero knowledge of where they were.

Iraq did not spontaneously opt for disarmament. They did it as part of a ceasefire, so they were forced to do it, otherwise the war might have gone on. So the motivation has been very different.

What surprises me, what amazes me, is that it seems the military people were expecting to stumble on large quantities of gas, chemical weapons and biological weapons.