The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) continues to misstate the degree of success it achieved on dismantling Saddam Hussein’s covert nuclear-bomb program during nuclear inspections in Iraq between 1991 and 1998, according to an analysis by the Nuclear Control Institute (NCI), a non-proliferation research and advocacy center.
“IAEA’s recent claims that they have ‘neutralized [Iraq’s] nuclear-weapon program’ and ‘destroyed all their key buildings and equipment’ related to weaponization are patently false, and the Agency’s own inspection reports prove it,” said Steven Dolley, NCI research director.
Dolley, citing IAEA’s own inspection reports as documentation, said: “Iraq has never surrendered to inspectors its two completed designs for a nuclear bomb, nuclear-bomb components such as explosive lenses and neutron initiators that it is known to have possessed, or almost any documentation of its efforts to enrich uranium to bomb-grade using gas centrifuges, devices which are small and readily concealed from reconnaissance.”[5]
Moreover, IAEA has previously conceded that Iraq’s weaponization R&D---small-scale technical research devoted to the design of a nuclear bomb’s components---is not readily detected by means of inspections. IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei stated in 1998 that “no matter how comprehensive the inspection, any country-wide verification process, in Iraq or anywhere else, has a degree of uncertainty that aims to verify the absence of readily concealable objects such as small amounts of nuclear material or weapons components.”[6]
The IAEA’s own guidelines for the safeguarding of highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium gives the conversion time for transforming these materials into weapons components as on the order of seven to ten days or one to three weeks, depending on the form the materials are in (metal, oxide or nitrate) when the materials are acquired by means of diversion or theft.[7] Thus, Iraq could be capable of producing a nuclear weapon in less than a month with sufficient diverted or stolen fissile material if it has managed to fabricate and conceal all of the non-nuclear components of a weapon.
The Agency’s own October 1997 review of its inspections in Iraq concluded that "Iraqi programme documentation records substantial progress in many important areas of nuclear weapon development, making it prudent to assume that Iraq has developed the capability to design and fabricate a basic fission weapon, based on implosion technology and fueled by highly enriched uranium."
“THERE THEY GO AGAIN”: IA.E.A. MISSTATES ITS RECORD ON DISMANTLING SADDAM’S NUCLEAR-BOMB PROGRAM
An unsigned CIA memo on Oct. 5 advised that "the CIA had reservations about the British reporting" on Iraq's alleged attempts in Niger, Hadley said [No. 2 on Bush's national security team]. A second memo, sent on Oct. 6, elaborated on the CIA's doubts, describing "some weakness in the evidence," such as the fact that Iraq already had a large stock of uranium and probably wouldn't need more, Hadley said.
The CIA abruptly removed from its Web site photos that showed key uranium enriching equipment found hidden in Iraq because they revealed secrets that countries seeking to develop nuclear weapons might find helpful, analysts said on Monday.
The CIA on Thursday had posted on its Web site a statement and six photos of centrifuge parts which had been hidden for 12 years under a rosebush in the garden of an Iraqi scientist, Mahdi Shukur Ubaydi.