Posted on 03/09/2004 7:44:13 AM PST by areafiftyone
BEIRUT, Lebanon - Iraq (news - web sites) was three years away from producing a nuclear bomb before the 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites), the No. 2 Iraqi scientist on the secret atomic program said Tuesday, offering a rare insider's assessment.
Noman Saad Eddin al-Noaimi, a former director-general of Iraq's nuclear program, told The Associated Press the Iraqis were able to produce less than 2.2 pounds of highly enriched uranium before the program was halted. It is estimated that a bomb would require at least 22 pounds.
"Producing the appropriate amount would have required at least two more years, under normal circumstances," he said. "Putting that substance into a weapon could have taken an additional year," he said on the sidelines of a Beirut meeting on the repercussions of the Iraq invasion.
Al-Noaimi had worked with Jafar Dhia Jafar, the father of Iraq's nuclear bomb program, and the two co-authored a paper on the subject, which they presented at the conference on Monday.
David Albright, an American nuclear expert and former U.N. inspector during the 1990s, said the three-year timeframe was "plausible" for the part of the nuclear program that Jafar was working on at the time.
Before the first Gulf War, Iraq's nuclear program was divided into a crash program to build a bomb and an indigenous effort to enrich uranium for use in atomic weapons — the program that Jafar was involved in.
In a 1997 review, the International Atomic Energy Agency said the 1990 Iraqi "crash program" had set a target to build a bomb in 1991. But the agency said there was no evidence the Iraqis, by the time of their Gulf War defeat in February 1991, had produced more than a "few grams" of highly enriched uranium. The Vienna-based agency considers 55 pounds a standard minimum for a rudimentary bomb.
The IAEA hasn't said how close Iraq came to building a nuclear bomb, but its Web site notes there were "indications that, by January 1991, Iraq had not overcome all the steps needed to produce a nuclear weapon."
The IAEA said there was no evidence Iraq had produced or clandestinely acquired weapons-grade nuclear material. It noted, however, Iraq had "achieved many major steps on the way to a nuclear weapon."
Al-Noaimi, who retired in the late '90s, said other scientists may have different estimates on how close Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was to having a nuclear bomb.
"This is my personal estimation. Others could be more optimistic or more pessimistic, but my personal assessment is that we were two to three years away from that, if everything went according to the required level and speed," he said.
In their paper, Al-Noaimi and Jafar declared that most Iraqi nuclear facilities were damaged or destroyed in the 1991 U.S.-led Gulf war. They said scientists, engineers and technicians involved in the program dispersed after the war and the program was dismantled on Saddam's orders.
Iraq, which lost the 1991 war to a U.S.-led international military coalition that ousted Saddam's forces from Kuwait, had to throw open its doors to U.N. inspectors charged with destroying Baghdad's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the programs to develop them.
Al-Noaimi and Jafar said Iraq never revived its nuclear weapons program.
A British intelligence dossier made public in September 2002, as U.S. and British leaders were building their case for another war against Iraq, maintained that if U.N. sanctions against Iraq were lifted, Saddam could develop a nuclear weapon in one to two years.
However, the International Atomic Energy Agency has said Iraq's nuclear program was in disarray before last year's war and was unlikely to be able to support any active effort to build atomic weapons.
Think of all the inocent Palestinians that might be killed. /sarcasm
I thought Clinton gave them Rhode Island for a new homeland?
“For IAEA to claim that they ‘neutralized’ Saddam’s nuclear weaponization capability is dangerously inaccurate, and muddies the waters of the Iraq debate,” said Dolley [Steven Dolley, NCI research director]. “Since 1997, the Agency has operated under the assumption that Iraq could successfully fabricate a working nuclear bomb if they managed to acquire a sufficient amount of fissile material. The Agency’s latest statement correctly points out that no one outside Iraq knows the current status of Iraq’s nuclear-bomb program, in large part because there have been no inspections in nearly four years. But for IAEA to suggest that it completely eliminated Iraq’s weaponization capability prior to 1998 is irresponsible in the extreme. The Agency should recant this statement.”
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.
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