"Of course, the previous weapon is the best ever, and the weapon you're going to get is wonderful, and what you've got now is absolute crap.
The short list was derived from the findings of previous weapons inspections and the latest intelligence culled from defectors and other sources by American and other intelligence experts.
Between 1991 and 1998, when a previous weapons inspection agency had the job of hunting down Iraq's banned weapons and then destroying them, even getting to the gates of search sites was often a problem, and getting beyond them in any reasonable length of time was frequently impossible.
The bill is likely to go substantially further than the previous assault weapons ban, which was passed in 1994 and allowed to lapse 10 years later.
If Assad has used gas on the battleground, it seems likely that he has done so much as he has deployed his previous weapons: in a carefully gauged, gradualist escalation, hoping to engineer an impasse of such dire consequence that he must be negotiated with.
However South Korea's Defense Ministry said it was difficult to believe that a fully-fledged hydrogen bomb (H-bomb) had been tested, and nuclear weapons experts told VICE News it was probable that this test was of a device similar to previous weapons tested by North Korea.
But no previous weapon had been so destructive.
The previous year, international weapons sales were nearly $34 billion, when measured in constant year 2000 dollars.
New teams of United Nations inspectors, returning here for the first time in four years in November, have already inspected Tuwaitha and more than 150 other formerly secret sites, of the 900 or so identified during the previous round of weapons inspections from 1991 to 1998.
But they were disappointed by his insistence on ploughing ahead with virtually all the weapons the previous administration had dreamed up.
