Iraq's nuclear bomb ability still a mystery

The Times
March 14, 2002
By Michael Evans, Defence Editor

THE status of Iraq's nuclear weapons programme remains a mystery to Western Intelligence agencies, despite the prediction in a Cabinet Office briefing paper that President Saddam Hussein is five years from developing the bomb.

The document, which is not yet completed, draws on covert material supplied by MI6 and GCHQ, the Government's signals intelligence centre in Cheltenham. The aim of the document is to show that there is enough evidence of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq to justify military action against Baghdad.

No one involved in seeking evidence of Saddam's bomb has any doubt that the Iraqi dictator is as determined as ever to acquire all the necessary ingredients. What is not known is whether Baghdad succeeded in secretly buying weapons-grade uranium on the black market in the 1990s, keeping it concealed from outside inspection teams.

President Bush said last night that the United States would "deal" with Saddam. "I am deeply concerned about Iraq. And so should the American people be concerned about Iraq. And so should people who love freedom be concerned about Iraq.

"This is a nation run by a man who is willing to kill his own people by using chemical weapons; a man who won't let inspectors into the country; a man who's obviously got something to hide. And he is a problem. And we're going to deal with him. But the first stage is to consult with our allies and friends, and that's exactly what we're doing."

The assessment of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in December 1998, before its inspectors were forced to leave Baghdad, was that there were no indications that Iraq had succeeded in acquiring weapons-usable material. Nor were there indications to suggest that Iraq had produced more than a few grams of weapons-grade nuclear material through its own methods.

The only confirmed material left in Iraq, after the agency had removed all known stocks of highly enriched uranium and plutonium in accordance with the UN Security Council Resolution 687, consisted of 1.8 tons of low-enriched uranium and several tons of natural and depleted uranium.

This material was locked in a storage site at a research centre at Tuwaitha, near Baghdad, and has been checked once a year by an IAEA team under the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which Iraq is a signatory.

The last check was carried out in January and none of the material had been tampered with, a spokesman for the IAEA confirmed yesterday. However, the agency is quick to point out that it has no jurisdiction anywhere else in Iraq.

The IAEA never found a blueprint for a nuclear bomb, although its inspectors were convinced one existed.

Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, tried to allay Russian concerns yesterday over a Pentagon document that lists Moscow as a potential nuclear target. At a news conference with Sergei Ivanov, Russia's Defence Minister, Mr Rumsfeld praised the state of the relationship between Moscow and Washington and Russia's role in the War on Terror.

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