Worthy of note that the documents were exposed as fake almost immediately after being made public.
1982 : (IRAQI AGENTS PAID $60 MILLION TO ITALIAN SMUGGLERS TO TRY TO OBTAIN SMUGGLE ENRICHED URANIUM, GETS SNOOKERED; THEN SUCCEED IN OBTAINING YELLOWCAKE TO ENRICH ON ITS OWN FROM CHINA, BRAZIL AND NIGER) In 1982 Iraqi agents paid $60 million to a team of Italian-based smugglers who claimed to have access to stores of plutonium and highly enriched uranium. According to U.S. officials, the smugglers' offer was a fraud, and the Iraqis walked away from it empty- handed. Stung by those setbacks, Baghdad turned to a third means of joining the nuclear club: the enrichment of uranium to weapons-grade level in gas centrifuges. The centrifuges take uranium-bearing ore or a mixture called yellowcake and separate out the 3% of uranium 235, which is fissionable, from the 97% of uranium 238, which is not. Iraq is known to possess 250 tons of yellowcake, most of it purchased in the 1970s from Brazil, China and Niger. In recent years the country has also begun producing its own yellowcake from mines in northern Iraq. - "When Will Saddam Get the Bomb? Not nearly so soon as the Bush Administration claims, "By William R. Doerner, December 10, 1990 via TIME Capsule, The Evolution of the Iraqi Threat, Monday, May. 13, 2002 of http://www.time.com/time/classroom/article/0,12422,235482,00.html.