Hans Blix Quotes

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.

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.

Never humiliate anyone.

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

International cooperation, multilateralism is indispensable.

Like I said, I'm more worried long term about the environmental issues then the use of arms.

Disarmament by war and democracy by occupation are difficult prospects.

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.

If you take the biological weapons in the United States we still will have perhaps a single individual who was able to make anthrax, dry it, and spread it through the mail and cause terror.

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.

By and large my relations with the US were good.

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

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

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

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

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

I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media. Not that I cared very much.

We have not found any smoking guns.

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

The world has gotten so interwoven.

I did not think so at first. But the US is so incredibly dependent on oil, that they wanted to secure oil in case competition on the world market becomes too hard.

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

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.