Here’s confirmation on yesterday’s story about the huge underground nuclear facility discovered south of Baghdad.

While they aren’t prepared to say the discovery is the smoking gun proving Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, Fox News confirmed that officials are very interested in the labyrinth of labs and warehouses unearthed by U.S. forces.

The discovery was unexpected and forces in the area are testing a variety of things to best determine the significance of the find.

Marine nuclear and intelligence experts have far found 14 buildings that have high levels of radiation, an embeddedreporter from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported Thursday, noting that some of the tests have found nuclear residue too deadly for human occupation.

The Marine radiation detectors go “off the charts” a few hundred meters outside the nuclear compound, where locals say “missile water” is stored in enormous caverns, the correspondent, Carl Prine, reported. Prine is embedded with the U.S. 1st Marine Division.

“It’s amazing,” Chief Warrant Officer Darrin Flick, the battalion’s nuclear, biological and chemical warfare specialist told the paper. “I went to the off-site storage buildings, and the rad detector went off the charts. Then I opened the steel door, and there were all these drums, many, many drums, of highly radioactive material.”