Saddam also appeared to have held on to a few delivery vehicles. The U.N. thought it had accounted for all but two of Saddam's Scuds, but the CIA suspects he may have as many as 12 to 24 of the 360-mile-range missiles still hidden. Under the terms of the cease-fire, Iraq was allowed to build only missiles that could fly no more than 93 miles. And during the 1998 U.S.-British air strikes, analysts caught a glimpse of previously unknown unmanned planes hidden in a bombed Iraqi hangar; they theorized that these were equipped with nozzles and tanks to spray deadly gases and toxins at low altitudes. The drones were jury-rigged clandestinely from Czech L-29 jet trainers legally bought years before.

Saddam's biological-weapons program was the deepest black hole. Despite more than 30 searches for various unconventional arms, inspectors did not even know of its existence until mid-1995, when Saddam's defecting son-in-law Hussein Kamal revealed that secret labs buried in Iraq's security, not military, apparatus were cooking up deadly germs. Iraq subsequently admitted it made batches of anthrax bacteria, carcinogenic aflatoxin, agricultural toxins and the paralyzing poison botulinum. Iraqi officials reported they had loaded 191 bombs, including 25 missile warheads, with the poisons for use in the Gulf War. They said they destroyed them after the conflict, but they presented no proof, and Western officials don't believe them.

WHAT HAS HE DONE LATELY?

Rolf Ekeus, the Swedish former director of the inspection team—officially, the U.N. Special Commission—has said those leftovers from before the Gulf War constitute a "marginal" threat. The real anxiety is over what Saddam, free of prying spies, has been brewing during the past four years. In August, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told CBS Evening News his country possessed no "nuclear or biological or chemical weapons." The CIA maintains Iraq's race to acquire a fresh supply of weapons has accelerated. The evidence it has presented so far is somewhat soft. Without inspectors on the ground, U.S. intelligence has been doing mostly guesswork. Spy satellite photographs can show sites and buildings but not what's inside them. That has left the CIA to rely largely on reports from Iraqi defectors, and their anti-Saddam stories are hard to verify. Analysts have also patched evidence together by following the smuggling trail that Saddam leaves when acquiring equipment and material, which he does through hundreds of front companies scattered across the world. Key questions about Iraq's unseen war machine focus on so-called dual-use purchases: fermenters that can brew beer or biological agents, sprayers that can spray crops or chemical toxins, machines that can mold tools or missile parts. Since 1998, the CIA believes, on the basis of the kinds and quantities of purchases it has tracked, "the risk of diversion has increased."

According to the CIA's assessment, Iraq can reactivate modest production of chemical weapons "within a few weeks to months." But if Saddam were stocking up new stores of chemical agents, he would still face challenges putting them to use. There is no evidence that the Iraqis have built devices able to deliver chemical weapons beyond Iraq's borders. He does not seem to have perfected chemical-tipped missiles, or the fusing devices and sophisticated sprayers needed to release the poison before it hits the ground. As of now, Saddam's most effective use of lethal chemicals would involve stuffing them into artillery shells and firing them at invading troops.

Biological weapons present a scarier prospect. Iraq is believed to have fermentation equipment at animal-feed facilities near Baghdad and the ability to convert workaday centrifuges into Cuisinarts for whizzing up lethal agents. But weaponizing most pathogens so that airborne bombs can spray them effectively over large areas remains a challenge for Saddam's engineers. Nonetheless, a gram of anthrax could serve as a poor man's suitcase bomb: that's 1 trillion spores, enough for 100 million fatal doses. Hiding, transporting and disseminating that type of poison is relatively easy: no missiles are needed, just a crop duster, backpack sprayer, even a perfume atomizer.

And then there is the possibility of a nuclear showdown with Iraq, which the Bush Administration has zeroed in on to make urgent the need for war. In his two red-alert speeches late last month, Vice President Dick Cheney flatly warned that Saddam would acquire an A-bomb "fairly soon." With it, he said, Saddam could "seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supply, directly threaten America's friends and subject the U.S. to nuclear blackmail."

Most experts, including the CIA, say that while Saddam may lust for a bomb, he hasn't got one yet. But he has demonstrated a continued interest in acquiring one. Iraq still has the technical capacity: military officials point to Saddam's continued employment of 200 nuclear Ph.D.s and 7,000 ancillary workers at a secret location near Baghdad, who, the Americans say, perfect bomb designs through low-level R. and D. Inspectors were not able to destroy all of Iraq's nuclear-manufacturing equipment, and U.N. experts say Saddam has been able since 1998 to smuggle in material to replace much of what was lost.

But Saddam is still thought to lack the essential ingredient: fissile material to spark nuclear combustion. Before the Gulf War, Saddam paid German scientists to help assemble hundreds of gas centrifuges to cook bomb-grade enriched uranium from tons of raw ore. The Germans are gone now, and so are nearly all those centrifuges, although both the Atomic Energy Agency and U.S. intelligence say Iraq probably managed to squirrel away a dozen. But even if the Iraqis could put those centrifuges back together without foreign help and operate them around the clock, in five years they still could not distill enough highly enriched uranium to make one bomb. Saddam could make one faster by stealing or buying enriched uranium on the black market from former Soviet republics—which U.S. intelligence believes he has not yet succeeded in doing. If he could make such a deal, however, U.S. officials say Iraq could have a crude nuclear weapon in months, with a yield equivalent to the ones that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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