Iraq steps up nuclear efforts, experts say

WASHINGTON - U.S. officials and Iraqi defectors say that Iraq has stepped up work on a nuclear weapons program that was just months away from perfecting a bomb before the 1990-91 Gulf War.

No one is yet suggesting publicly that Iraq has an atomic bomb. The scientists that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein calls his "nuclear mujahedeen," or holy warriors, are believed to lack the means for now to manufacture highly enriched uranium.

But reports over the last year describe renewed Iraqi efforts to acquire weapons-usable uranium and enrichment materials from the former Soviet bloc.

"I don't think he has it right now," said Robert Gallucci, a former special U.S. ambassador on nonproliferation and a weapons inspector in Iraq. "But do I want to bet New York City on that? No."

Iraq's pursuit of nuclear weapons has become a key argument offered by some Bush administration officials for a pre-emptive war against Iraq sooner rather than later.

"Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire such weapons fairly soon," Vice President Dick Cheney said last week in San Antonio.

"Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and sitting atop 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, to take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, and to directly threaten America's friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail."

Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations said Friday that Iraq no longer has weapons of mass destruction programs.

"We have no nuclear bomb. We have no weapons of mass destruction," Ambassador Mohammed Aldouri said on NBC's Today show.

President Bush phoned the leaders of Russia, China and France Friday to discuss U.S. views on Iraq and said he would send officials to those countries to provide fuller briefings.

The president is expected to describe U.S. concerns about Iraq's weapons programs in a Sept. 12 address to the United Nations. Mr. Bush plans to tell world leaders that unless they take strong action to disarm Iraq, the United States will be forced to act on its own, The Washington Post reported, citing senior administration officials. Most U.S. allies have strongly opposed new military action against Iraq.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has expressed the strongest support for the U.S. position, is scheduled to meet with Mr. Bush Saturday, and Mr. Blair's office says a British analysis of Iraq's weapons programs will be released soon.

"I believe there is evidence that they will acquire nuclear weapons capability if they possibly can," Mr. Blair said Tuesday.

Reports from defectors, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and nonproliferation specialists point to new efforts by Iraq to cross the nuclear weapons threshold.

Atomic agency scientists said Thursday that satellite photos show new buildings at sites where weapons inspectors found nuclear weapons programs between 1991 and 1998.

The IAEA's weapons inspectors left Iraq along with other U.N. arms inspectors in December 1998 after Iraq refused access to presidential palaces and said the U.N. program was compromised by U.S. spies.

U.S. and British warplanes then bombed 101 suspected weapons targets across Iraq. The arms inspectors have not returned since then.

An IAEA team visits an Iraqi nuclear research lab every year to check on the status of 1.3 tons of slightly enriched uranium, but the agency has not been allowed to look elsewhere.

Mr. Hussein's agents are apparently hunting for a nuclear core in the former Soviet Union. Two reports of Iraqi nuclear smuggling surfaced this summer.

Khidir Hamza, the former head of Iraq's nuclear weapons program, who defected in 1995, says an Iraqi intelligence team took delivery in Africa recently of what were apparently spent fuel rods from a Russian nuclear reactor. The rods contained radioactive material that would be difficult, though not impossible, to convert into weapons-grade uranium, Mr. Hamza said, and they could be readily used for a so-called dirty bomb of radioactive materials scattered by conventional explosives.

Mr. Hamza said the report came from an Iraqi intelligence officer who was part of the team and later defected to the West. The exchange took place in Africa because the Iraqis feared getting caught in a sting operation in Europe mounted by Russian or U.S. agents, he said.

The second smuggling attempt, first reported in The Washington Times , involved Iraqi attempts inside the former Soviet bloc to purchase high-quality steel tubing used in uranium enrichment to prevent corrosion by uranium hexafluoride gas.

Mr. Hamza said the report suggests Iraq is trying to manufacture its own weapons-grade uranium through a process known as gaseous diffusion that could deliver enough material for three bombs by 2005. He said the enrichment efforts could be scattered at scores of sites across the country to prevent detection.

"This is more dangerous than getting enough fissile material for a bomb from outside," he said in an interview. "You can purchase, at best, a kilogram here or there, at best enough for one or two bombs. When you have a production facility, you have weapons on an Indian or Pakistani scale. They could have a large-scale nuclear arsenal in a decade."

The IAEA reported to the United Nations in 1999 that it had "fully and effectively" dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons program. Former arms inspector Scott Ritter, who years ago discovered four nuclear bomb packages in Iraq that lacked only a nuclear core, has argued that the program was demolished and that the Bush administration's warnings are only a pretext for war.

Kelly Motz, editor of Iraq Watch, an Internet publication focusing on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, said nuclear weapons are "the threat you need if you want to justify going in and taking Saddam's regime out."

"It's pretty clear he already has biological and chemical weapons," she said. "So far, that hasn't been enough to enable or encourage us to act. But if you could prove he was close to or on the edge of nuclear weapons, which are such a quantifiably greater threat, it would make your case clearer and could be the impetus to act."

Former weapons inspectors who tried to demolish Iraq's weapons programs after the Gulf War say Iraq had at least two workable designs for nuclear weapons, and had mastered a detonation system that would trigger a nuclear explosion.

After the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Iraqi scientists tried to fabricate a nuclear core from reactor fuel rods that were under IAEA supervision. They built a weapon weighing more than a ton, then shifted efforts to assembling a smaller, lighter weapon that could be fitted into a missile warhead.

Mr. Hamza said the goal was to conduct a test of the missile and nuclear weapon before the U.S. attacked to drive Iraq from Kuwait.

The weapons site was destroyed by U.S. warplanes, and the IAEA removed the nuclear material after the war.

Mr. Hamza said Iraq could build a bomb in a matter of months if it obtains weapons-grade uranium.

"The effective organizations there in 1990 are, apart from a couple of people, still there today," said former arms inspector Tim McCarthy. "One can imagine all sorts of technical approaches to building a weapon, but none of that is possible without the people."

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also pointed to Mr. Hussein's nuclear science cadres.

"To the extent that they have kept their nuclear scientists together and working on these efforts, one has to assume that they have not been playing tiddlywinks, that they have been focusing on nuclear weapons," he said this week.

In January, a CIA report to Congress expressed concern about Iraqi efforts to acquire radioactive materials suitable for a weapon, but the report was fairly low-key in its overall assessment.

"We believe that Iraq has probably continued at least low-level theoretical R&D associated with its nuclear program," the report said.

But reports over the last year describe renewed Iraqi efforts to acquire weapons-usable uranium and enrichment materials from the former Soviet bloc.

For those of us old enough to remember, this is simply a continuation of the old game of nuclear brinksmanship that the Soviet Union and its client states played with us throughout the Cold War. And NOTHING has changed, except now they're using Arab proxies.

I do hope Dubya told Pooty long ago, and in no uncertain terms, that if even one nuke goes off on our soil, or is used against our troops or interests overseas, or against Britain (the rest of Europe be damned), then the United States will consider it a direct attack on us by the Russians, Chinese, and their client states, and will immediately launch a full-scale nuclear retaliatory strike against them all.

Meantime we need to step up our war on terror. Time's a wasting.

Hussein, Saddam Kamel: in-law traitors

SADDAM HUSSEIN & HIS CLAN - ARAB NATIONALISM IN ONE FAMILY

Hussein Kamel Majid, calling for the overthrow of his father-in-law Saddam Hussein, at a press conference in Jordan in 1995.

The story of Hussein Kamel Majid and his brother Saddam Kamel is almost beyond belief. These two men, more steeped in the blood of the Baathist regime than anyone except Saddam and Udai Hussein, were the pampered boys Saddam took into the bosom of his family by marrying off his two daughters to them.

Hussein Kamel occupied a key position in Iraq's military machine, becoming Minister of Military Industries in his mid-30s and had distinguished himself in Baathist terms by brutality during the occupation of Kuwait. His brother Saddam Kamel was head of Saddam Hussein's presidential bodyguard.

The two were also cousins of Saddam's before they married his daughters.

In August 1995, they surprised the world by fleeing to Jordan where they spoke of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. In the worst of all possible insults to Iraqi clan sensibilities, they took with them their wives, Saddam's two daughters, and their children - Saddam's grand children.

Baghdad was shocked. It later emerged that they were afraid for their lives because Udai, Saddam's elder son, wanted to remove them from Saddam's circle. It was the biggest blow Saddam had suffered at the hands of his own people.

But the Kamel brothers flabberghasted the world six months later when they decided to return to Iraq, having been given assurances that Saddam would pardon them. It beggared belief that anyone who had betrayed and humiliated Saddam in front of the world should willingly put themselves in his power again.

In February 1996, they returned from Jordan to Iraq. As soon as they crossed the border, the two men were separated from their wives and children and sped away towards Baghdad in a well-armed motorcade.

Sure enough, a few days later it was announced that their own relatives had killed them in a shoot-out, outraged at their shaming of the family's reputation. The killers were also - conveniently - killed themselves.

Why did they do it? The belief in Saddam's mercy in such a situation was one of the most fascinating intersections between politics and psychology seen anywhere in the world in recent years. These men had killed with their own hand, deceived, embezzled and consigned men to torture in the name of the Baathist regime. They should have known the score.

Those who spoke to them during the six month stay say Hussein Majid showed increasing signs of moroseness and depression. Groomed in Saddam's elite forces since his teens, he had fled to Jordan confidently expecting to become the centre of an opposition movement which would replace Saddam and rule in his place.

Instead, the Iraqi opposition shunned him because of his past record as Saddam's henchman. His host King Hussein came to differ with him over how to act over the future of Iraq and then - ever so subtly - isolated him by assigning a small out of the way palace to him in the middle of the Jordanian countryside. Hussein and Saddam Kamel quickly came to be living in a gilded cage where they were little more than exhibits of the impending doom of Saddam's regime and worth nothing in their own right.

Plus, neither had any grip on reality outside the Machiavellian world of Baghdad. Hussein Kamel cut a confused figure at the press conferences he gave, parroting phrases about democracy and freedom while showing little real understanding of what they mean.

"We will continue our work, we would like to call on the officers of the Iraqi army, the officers of the Republican Guard, the officers of the Special Guard, to the civil servants of the Iraqi state and to all the Iraqi society to be ready for this important change which will make Iraq a modern state dealing with international community in realism and with the Arab community in spirit of interaction," was about as close as he could get to specifics when describing his plan of action.

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