Iraq's nuclear weapons program

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CIA Report on Iraq's Nuclear Weapons Program



More than ten years of sanctions and the loss of much of Iraq's physical nuclear infrastructure under IAEA oversight have not diminished Saddam's interest in acquiring or developing nuclear weapons.

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Iraq's efforts to procure tens of thousands of proscribed high-strength aluminum tubes are of significant concern. All intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons and that these tubes could be used in a centrifuge enrichment program. Most intelligence specialists assess this to be the intended use, but some believe that these tubes are probably intended for conventional weapons programs.

Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons development program before the Gulf war that focused on building an implosion-type weapon using highly enriched uranium. Baghdad was attempting a variety of uranium enrichment techniques, the most successful of which were the electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS) and gas centrifuge programs. After its invasion of Kuwait, Iraq initiated a crash program to divert IAEA-safeguarded, highly enriched uranium from its Soviet and French-supplied reactors,but the onset of hostilities ended this effort. Iraqi declarations and the UNSCOM/IAEA inspection process revealed much of Iraq's nuclear weapons efforts, but Baghdad still has not provided complete information on all aspects of its nuclear weapons program.


Iraq has withheld important details relevant to its nuclear program, including procurement logs, technical documents, experimental data, accounting of materials, and foreign assistance.

Baghdad also continues to withhold other data about enrichment techniques, foreign procurement, weapons design, and the role of Iraqi security services in concealing its nuclear facilities and activities.

In recent years, Baghdad has diverted goods contracted under the Oil-for-Food Program for military purposes and has increased solicitations and dual-use procurements—outside the Oil-for-Food process—some of which almost certainly are going to prohibited WMD and other weapons programs. Baghdad probably uses some of the money it gains through its illicit oil sales to support its WMD efforts.

Before its departure from Iraq, the IAEA made significant strides toward dismantling Iraq's nuclear weapons program and unearthing the nature and scope of Iraq's past nuclear activities. In the absence of inspections, however, most analysts assess that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear program—unraveling the IAEA's hard-earned accomplishments.

Iraq retains its cadre of nuclear scientists and technicians, its program documentation, and sufficient dual-use manufacturing capabilities to support a reconstituted nuclear weapons program. Iraqi media have reported numerous meetings between Saddam and nuclear scientists over the past two years, signaling Baghdad's continued interest in reviving a nuclear program.

Iraq's expanding international trade provides growing access to nuclear-related technology and materials and potential access to foreign nuclear expertise. An increase in dual-use procurement activity in recent years may be supporting a reconstituted nuclear weapons program.


The acquisition of sufficient fissile material is Iraq's principal hurdle in developing a nuclear weapon.

Iraq is unlikely to produce indigenously enough weapons-grade material for a deliverable nuclear weapon until the last half of this decade. Baghdad could produce a nuclear weapon within a year if it were able to procure weapons-grade fissile material abroad.

Baghdad may have acquired uranium enrichment capabilities that could shorten substantially the amount of time necessary to make a nuclear weapon.

Source: CIA. Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs. October 2002.

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Iraq’s Nuclear Weapons Program:
Unresolved Issues

Steven Dolley
Nuclear Control Institute
May 12, 1998

Weapons Design

Many important weapons-design drawings and reports are still missing.
The status of R&D on advanced weapons designs (boosted, thermonuclear) remains unclear.
Documentation of research on explosive lenses remains incomplete. Some key design drawings are still missing.
The extent of outside assistance offered to or received by Iraq, including a reported offer of an actual nuclear weapon design, remains unresolved.

Centrifuge R&D

Almost all centrifuge design documents and drawings are missing.
Information is incomplete and drawings are missing related to Iraq’s super-critical centrifuge R&D program.
Significant inconsistencies exist between Iraqi and foreign testimony on the amount of foreign assistance and components provided to the centrifuge program.

Missing Components and Equipment

Not all "Group 4" nuclear weaponization equipment has been located or accounted for.
Some uranium-conversion components remain unaccounted for.
A plutonium-beryllium neutron source, potentially useful as a neutron initiator for a nuclear bomb, is still missing.

Uranium Stocks and Enrichment Program

Large stockpiles of natural uranium remain in Iraq.
Historical uranium MUF’s for Iraq’s uranium conversion and enrichment are large. Over three tons of uranium remains unaccounted for.
The credibility of low (20%) historical capacity for EMIS (calutron) uranium enrichment reported by Iraq is open to question.

Iraqi Reporting to the IAEA

The completeness of Iraq’s FFCD (Full, Final and Complete Declaration) is questionable. No information is publicly available on this report.
The completeness of Iraq’s report on the technical achievements of its weaponization .program is unknown. No information is publicly available on this report.
Many documents seized by Iraq during the "parking lot stand-off" in September 1991 were never returned to the IAEA and remain unaccounted for, including key centrifuge documents.
It is not publicly known whether all the documents from the Haider House cache have been translated and fully analyzed.

Iraqi Concealment Activities

Iraq now officially denies that a governmental committee to minimize impact of NPT violations ever existed, even though Iraq itself first revealed the committee to the IAEA.
Reports on Iraqi nuclear team’s interactions with IAEA inspectors are incomplete.
It is not publicly known whether Iraq’s report on their post-war concealment activities has been completed and reviewed.
Iraq has not enacted a criminal law to punish violations of UN resolutions.

Post-war Nuclear Program Activities

Conversion of former weapons program facilities has not been fully documented.
Documentation of ongoing activities at former weapons facilities remains incomplete.
Information is inconsistent on the date of termination of weapons activity at the Al Atheer weapons facility.
No evidence of any Iraqi decree to halt the nuclear weapons program.
Extent of Iraq’s post-war foreign procurement network has not been documented.

NCI's report, "Iraq and the Bomb: The Nuclear Threat Continues," is available on the web at http://www.nci.org/sadb.htm




nci@mailback.com

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August 15, 1998


An Iraqi Defector Warns of Iraq's Nuclear Weapons Research

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By JUDITH MILLER and JAMES RISEN

n Iraqi scientist who defected to the United States has publicly described for the first time the inner workings of Iraq's three-decade effort to build a nuclear bomb.

The scientist, Khidhir Abdul Abas Hamza, said that before he fled Iraq in 1994 he helped train a cadre of young scientists who, working with more senior scientists involved in other projects, would be capable of quickly resuming Iraq's atomic weapons program if the United Nations cuts back on its inspections and, ultimately, lifts economic sanctions.

Hamza is the highest-ranking scientist ever to defect from Baghdad, and his comments, in nearly 10 hours of interviews, come as a new confrontation is building over whether Baghdad has dismantled its chemical, nuclear and biological programs. Iraq has in recent days refused to cooperate further with U.N. weapons inspectors.

In the interviews, Hamza, 59, whose defection was an important intelligence coup for the United States that nearly slipped through American fingers because of the CIA's inattention, drew a chilling picture of life as an Iraqi scientist. He said his colleagues were lavishly rewarded for their successes and tortured by the secret police when they failed to deliver.

He said Iraq's nuclear weapons program was personally directed by Saddam Hussein, Iraq's leader, since its inception 27 years ago. It was abetted, he said, by a host of Western companies, which sold Iraq sophisticated equipment as they "winked and laughed" at patently false cover stories.

On the eve of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Hamza said, Iraq had completed all the research and testing needed for an atomic weapon and was feverishly trying to make at least one crude bomb using uranium from civilian reactors. This effort, Hamza said, could have produced a bomb in a few months, but it was disrupted by the allied bombing campaign.

Only after the war did U.S. intelligence officials learn that they had grossly underestimated Iraq's nuclear program, which they had believed to be 10 years from producing a nuclear bomb. But Hamza's defection to the United States and his subsequent debriefing by the CIA brought fresh details to light, including these:

Iraq's peaceful nuclear power program, begun 30 years ago, was quickly turned into a cover for the secret bomb program, which went ahead even as Baghdad opened up its research reactors to Western inspection.

Israel's intensive campaign in the 1970s and '80s to stop Iraq from acquiring a bomb accomplished little. The 1981 Israeli bombing raid that destroyed Iraq's French-built Osirak nuclear reactor prompted Saddam to drop the pretense of a peaceful atomic effort and to go "full steam" on a covert program to build a bomb.

Iraq took advantage of America's open access to valuable scientific information. Hamza said that as a senior member of Iraq's nuclear program, he spent time at American university libraries studying the latest scientific journals and technical accounts of America's nuclear efforts.

Hamza, who intelligence officials said had been resettled here by the CIA, said he was speaking out now because he was frustrated that Saddam is still obstructing international inspections and deceiving the West. U.S. officials said they did not authorize or encourage Hamza to speak publicly, but they have confirmed many elements of his account.

Until now, Hamza's defection has been a closely guarded secret. A 1995 article in The Sunday Times of London and a 1997 book by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn included detailed accounts of his alleged kidnapping and assassination by secret Iraqi agents.

In fact, his escape from Iraq is a remarkable spy yarn that almost went awry. According to former and current intelligence officials, the CIA initially rebuffed Hamza's appeals to defect to the United States. He spent a year in Libya before the agency realized its mistake and agreed to resettle him and rescue his family from their home in downtown Baghdad.


( Cont )

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Nuclear Ambitions: <br />
He Helped Start Secret Arms Program <br />
<br />
orn in southern Iraq into a family of Shiite Muslims, Hamza graduated from Baghdad University and then studied physics in the early 1960s at...

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Incomplete Results:
Nuclear Scientists Beaten and Tortured

he Iraqi scientists were expected to produce results, and in one crucial aspect of the program, they had little to show. Despite years of effort, they had failed to produce the enriched uranium that is an essential component in an atomic weapon.

When Hussein Kamel, Saddam's ambitious son-in-law, took over the nuclear program in 1987, Hamza said he helped him unmask a team of scientists who were falsely claiming success in enriching uranium.

Hamza was immediately named Iraq's director of weapons programs. "I went to the palace" he said, and "emerged with a new car and the title of a director general."

He said Kamel had ordered him to find a nuclear bomb trigger while other scientists pursued at least five different methods of separating uranium to make bomb-grade fuel. Hamza said that he had purchased a trigger in Poland, which did not work well, but that other Iraqi scientists developed a workable trigger in Iraq.

U.S. intelligence officials knew little of the Iraqi effort, in part because the enrichment program relied on a technique abandoned by the United States after the World War II Manhattan Project some 40 years earlier. "They never put two and two together," Hamza said.

But the enrichment program was still slow to pay off, and Kamel grew restless. The inevitable result was the onset of beatings and torture for the scientists.

"Hussein Kamel used to send scientists who displeased him to the torture center in Al Taji," Hamza recounted. "You couldn't survive more than two weeks there." A director general of one Iraqi nuclear program was beaten so badly that "he couldn't come to work for a week."

Shortly before the 1991 Gulf War, Kamel started a crash program to develop a bomb. "Kamel was crazy, but he managed to produce in a month things that would normally take a year," Hamza said. "Fear works well."

In December 1990 after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, Hamza said, he asked to retire from the program. But he was told that he could do so only if he agreed to stay on as a senior adviser and help train Iraq's new generation of bombmakers.

He left an important legacy. According to Hamza, the program had perfected two methods for enriching uranium, and each could have produced enough material to make a bomb in a year or two.

Hamza witnessed the intensive American and allied bombing campaign in the Persian Gulf War and was stunned at how little the Americans and their allies knew about Iraq's program. More than half of Iraq's major nuclear installations, most notably the sprawling Al Atheer complex, the program's busy new weapons center, were left largely untouched by the bombing raids.

Ultimately, Hamza's long-running bureaucratic feud with another leading bomb scientist, the terror of working inside the Iraqi police state and finally the killing of colleagues in the secret program persuaded him to flee.

The final straw came when the body of Adil Fayadh, one of Iraq's chief nuclear procurement officers, was found near Hamza's farm. "He had a farm next to mine," he said. "They killed him and put him in the ditch on his farm. It got me very worried. It had to be Iraqi intelligence. That night, about two dozen people came to my house, pale-faced and worried. They didn't know what was going to happen."

Hamza defected soon after, and he continues to anxiously follow the Iraqi nuclear program from afar. He insisted that Saddam remains determined to reconstitute the chemical, biological and nuclear programs in which he invested so much. "Without these props, he would lose power," he said.



Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company

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http://www.aipac.org/documents/AIPACmemo100802.pdf