Free Republic

The physicist who ran Iraq's nuclear weapons program for 25 years before the U.S. liberation claimed on Wednesday that Saddam Hussein gave up his nuclear ambitions in 1991 - even though the Iraqi dictator maintained a 500-ton stockpile of uranium and kept his nuclear research team intact right up until March 2003. In his first-ever broadcast interview, Jaffar Dhia Jaffar told the BBC that Saddam's al Tuwaitha nuclear weapons research facility was heavily damaged in the first Gulf War. "Everything was destroyed, such that the program couldn't be restarted at the time at all, and it never restarted," he claimed....

Saddam Hussein gave up all of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, the scientist who headed his nuclear program, Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, said in a BBC interview on Wednesday. "There was no capability. There was no chemical or biological or any what are called weapons of mass destruction," said Jaffar in what BBC television called his first-ever broadcast interview. Speaking in Paris, where he now lives, Jaffar - who ran Saddam's nuclear program for 25 years - said there was "no development" of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons "at any time after 1991"....