Posted on 09/23/2002 7:48:09 AM PDT by FreeLibertarian
ALBUQUERQUE—A New Mexico scientist who served as a weapons inspector says Iraq's primary roadblock in building nuclear weapons has been in getting core materials.
Retired Sandia National Laboratories scientist Paul Stokes took inspection teams into Iraq while Saddam Hussein was cooperating with the United Nations in 1994 and 1995.
"We could go anywhere, anytime, unannounced," Stokes said.
Stokes knows that Iraq had some computer-controlled machine tools that could be used for cut precision parts and plans for nuclear weapons in 1995.
But years later, he says the country still might have trouble getting core nuclear materials and tools.
"They certainly hadn't started putting it together," he said.
By 1998, inspection teams from the International Atomic Energy Agency had a "technically coherent" picture of Iraq's nuclear program, according to the group. They concluded that Iraq was aiming to produce a small arsenal of nuclear weapons and had taken many of the needed steps. Yet Iraq still lacked the nuclear fuel.
The Bush administration has recently pushed for military involvement due to concern over a shipment of precision-grade aluminum tubing recently sent from China to Jordan. The tubes, the administration contends, could be used in Iraq to build a gas centrifuge to render weapons-grade uranium from lower-quality material.
Assembling such a working tool "is not a trivial operation," Stokes said. And producing enough of the needed uranium would take years, he said.
The four-year gap since the departure of inspectors causes concern for Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Jim Lee. Formerly an Accident and Consequence Analysis Department manager at Sandia, Lee also served as a U.N. weapons inspector in 1998.
Much of the nuclear weapon infrastructure the inspectors surveyed was built up between 1987 and 1991, when it was largely destroyed.
But during those early years, Iraqis "had accomplished a vast amount," Lee recently told a Sandia labs in-house newsletter.
"So, is it possible they've made advancements - major advancements in their nuclear program since then? I'd have to conclude, based on what I saw, . . . yes it is," Lee told Lab News.
In his address to the House Armed Services Committee last week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called Saddam "a grave and gathering danger," accusing Iraq of having an active program to acquire and develop nuclear weapons.
David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington and an inspector in 1996, said he doubts that Iraq has had enough time to assemble a secret uranium enrichment plant since inspectors left.
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