With Or Without A Stash Of Nuclear Weapons, Iraq Is Scary

Cleveland Plain Dealer | June 23, 2002 | Elizabeth Sullivan

[Stand Watch Listen]

Saddam Hussein is a known evil. That's one reason President George W. Bush is so determined to topple him.

U.N. weapons inspectors spent more than seven years exposing the full dimensions of Saddam's weapons ambitions. Such insights don't exist for Bush's other "axis of evil" states, Iran and North Korea.

What was learned was sobering. Saddam has been mounting an industrial-strength quest for weapons of mass destruction for decades. He's believed to have some of them ready to go today - mostly chemical weapons and possibly bio-bombs.

Still, after years poking around in his palaces, offices, biowar labs, testing sites, weapons dumps and military archives, inspectors gleaned a sense of how Saddam operates that suggests there are ways to stop him short of warfare. At the very least, the record reflects the value of having inspectors on the ground. Iraqi-U.N. talks on returning the inspectors resume July 4.

Inspectors aren't a panacea.

U.N. weapons inspectors were in Iraq from June 1991 until December 1998. It took them years to pierce Saddam's deceptions.

Only in 1995 did Iraq admit to an aggressive bioweapons program. Eventually, inspectors forced Saddam to reveal key elements of his crash efforts to develop nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and the missiles, drones and pilotless MiGs to deliver them.

Tens of thousands of chemical weapons and hundreds of missiles were destroyed. So was virtually all the equipment Saddam needed to make highly enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb.

Getting the Bomb

For years, Saddam deceived Western intelligence about the extent of his weapons programs, particularly his all-important drive for a nuke.

U.N. inspectors were shocked to uncover a sophisticated, ongoing nuclear research program involving many previously unknown sites. Iraqi scientists, they learned, had designed an efficient, relatively small nuclear warhead. All they lacked was the 35 pounds of weapons-grade material per bomb, missile expert Gary Milhollin told Congress two years ago. Milhollin directs the nonprofit Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington, D.C.

Iraq tried every means it could to produce its own bomb-grade material - and was getting close, since money was no object. One production line involved technology that had been considered so old and inefficient it was declassified by the U.S. government, said David Kay, one of the first nuclear weapons inspectors. Iraqi scientists found the plans, duplicated the plant and even improved on the process, Kay testified before Congress this year.

Kay says Iraq is still trying to reconstitute its nuclear program, and could be three to six years away, "worst case," from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Other experts say that time frame might shorten to months should Iraq be able to buy nuclear-bomb material in the former Soviet Union.

"It's very hard to find reports or assessments you can have confidence in, that we actually know what they're doing," said David Albright, another former nuclear weapons inspector. The uncertainty about something so critical underscores the need to get inspectors back into Iraq, he said.

Bioweapons

Iraq's concerted efforts to hide its biowar program have led many to conclude that Saddam sees biological weapons as a bridge to the Bomb.

The biowar program goes back to 1973, when Iraq began work on loading wheat smut aboard a crude drone it could use, hypothetically, to wreck food production in regional nemesis Iran.

"Later the interest changed," Richard Spertzel, the retired Army colonel who led U.N. bioweapons inspections, told Congress this year, and Iraq began exploring "other agents that are only of utility for terrorist applications."

There is no evidence that biological weapons were used during Iraq's 1980-88 war against Iran, although chemical weapons were used.

When Iraq finally 'fessed up to its biowar program in mid-1995, it claimed to have eliminated all of its weapons as well as thousands of liters of anthrax, aflatoxins and the toxins that cause botulism.

U.N. inspectors literally went digging in the desert trying to find evidence to support those claims. In most cases, it wasn't there.

In a 250-page wrapup, the U.N. weapons commission warned in 1999 that Iraq retained the ability to make biological weapons "quickly and in volume."

Since then, allegations have surfaced that Iraq is using mobile biowar labs disguised as milk trucks. A recent defector also charges that Saddam has built vast underground chemical warfare and biowar bunkers near mosques and homes.

"There is no doubt that Iraq has a much stronger [biowarfare] program today than it had in 1990," says Spertzel.

Chemical Warfare

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, it had a huge arsenal of chemical weapons and the experience using them. In the best-documented incident, an estimated 5,000 Iraqi Kurdish civilians in the town of Halabja were killed by mustard gas and nerve agents in 1988.

Stephen H. Baker and Michael Donovan of the nonprofit Center for Defense Information estimate Iraq had stockpiled 1,000 metric tons of chemical weapons by 1990. A crash effort to produce VX, one of the most lethal and fast-acting nerve gases, was under way.

In 1996, Iraq admitted to U.N. inspectors it had made 3.9 tons of VX, but couldn't document adequately what happened to it.

And although thousands of chemical weapons were destroyed because of U.N. inspections, thousands more remain unaccounted for. One U.N. inspector stumbled on an Iraqi Air Force document that indicated Iraq had overstated by as many as 6,000 the number of chemical weapons it used against Iran. Iraqi officials never answered the question of what became of those weapons.

The bottom line is that Iraq doesn't need the Bomb to threaten its neighbors or invading U.S. troops. It already has chemical weapons and the rudimentary means to deliver them.

Iraq is believed to retain anywhere from two to several dozen short-range Scud missiles as well as hidden artillery shells pre-loaded with chemical weapons and possibly pilotless drones fitted up with the required tanks and aerosol sprays for bioweapons.

The unknown is what might prompt Saddam to use these weapons against Israel or U.S. troops, knowing Washington and Tel Aviv might answer such an attack with weapons of mass destruction of their own.

[Free the USA]

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[The Great Satan]

The unknown is what might prompt Saddam to use these weapons against Israel or U.S. troops, knowing Washington and Tel Aviv might answer such an attack with weapons of mass destruction of their own.

Another silly, coy, childish fairy tale dreamworld article. There is nothing "unknown" about what would prompt Saddam Hussein to use CBW. We have said we are going to try to remove him Saddam from power and kill him. Obviously, that would be ample motivation. Saddam is still alive today because he presented a credible threat to slaughter the Israeli population with anthrax back in 1991 ("Prepared BW munitions for missile and aircraft delivery in 1990-1991 Gulf War; this included loading al-Hussein ballistic missile warheads and R-400 aerial bombs with Bacillis anthracis"). Deterrence works and Saddam would be a fool not to use it when his very survival is at stake. And the target would not be vaccinated US troops, but the US and European civilian population, as Cheney recently outlined to Tony Blair (Iraq warnings prompt British rush to get smallpox vaccine). Saddam's stunning 9-11 strike against his US adversary proved out the methodology of forward-positioned sleeper agents; the subsequent threat to use the most sophisticated weaponized anthrax ever seen on the US population shows he means business.

[Don Myers]

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