It's no accident that the French, along with Germany, have now lined up in opposition to U.S. plans to use military force to neutralize Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program. Especially since, according to at least one former top Iraqi nuclear scientist, Paris helped Baghdad go nuclear in the first place. According to Dr. Khidir Hamza, who ran Saddam's nuclear bombmaking program in the early 1990s, Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor was built by the French. When the Israelis determined that the reactor's real purpose was to make nuclear weapons, they destroyed it in a 1981 bombing raid.
"From the moment Osirak was hit we knew we had to try another method to get the bomb," Dr. Hamza told the Washington Times in September 2002.