What Saddam's Got

Monday, May. 13, 2002 By JOSH TYRANGIEL
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When Iraq accepted the terms of the 1991 Gulf War cease-fire, it agreed to "destroy, or render harmless," all its weapons of mass destruction. The last U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in December 1998, after obstruction by officials there rendered their work pointless. It is generally agreed that Saddam Hussein has not been behaving himself in their absence. The U.N. has collected reams of color satellite photos showing an unmistakable boom in reconstruction of Iraqi sites, some of which were weapons facilities in the past. "You can see hundreds of new roofs in these photos," says Hans Blix, the Swedish diplomat who heads the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which is preparing to conduct future inspections in the event Saddam consents to them. "But you don't know what's under them." U.S. intelligence officials beg to differ. Says one: "The Iraqis have been putting themselves in a position to rejuvenate their weapons-of-mass-destruction programs."

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DOES SADDAM HAVE THE BOMB?

No one has a precise answer. The International Atomic Energy Agency dismantled 40 nuclear-research facilities before the U.N. inspectors left Iraq, including three uranium-enrichment sites. Prior to the inspections, Saddam's stealthiness had been so effective that none of the 40 were known to the outside world. Clearly, Iraq was on its way to becoming a nuclear power. Without ground inspections, those who track Iraq's nuclear development have had to rely on interviews with recent defectors and surveys of suppliers Baghdad has contacted seeking parts. Both suggest that Iraq's nuclear program is back in full swing. "Iraq's known nuclear scientists are gravitating to the country's five nuclear research sites," says Charles Duelfer, who was the second-ranking official on the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) on Iraq until it was disbanded in 1999. "That doesn't appear to be coincidental."

Experts including Duelfer and Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, believe Saddam has the sophisticated triggers, weapon housings and everything else he needs to build a nuclear device--except for a sufficient supply of weapons-grade enriched uranium. Intelligence indicates that he is angling to obtain some on the international black market, but it's not something that your friendly neighborhood arms smuggler can lay hands on right away. So Saddam also is working to enrich his own uranium. That's a major technological challenge, but Iraq is expected to succeed within three to six years, at its current rate of progress.

WHAT ABOUT CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS?

Intelligence about Iraq's capabilities on these fronts is firmer and no less frightening. "We destroyed a lot of chemical weapons," says Duelfer of the U.N. inspection team. "They had a facility that was going night and day, like some weird James Bond movie." Inspectors discovered and disposed of 38,500 chemical munitions (such as shells, warheads, bombs), 690 tons of chemical weapons agents, 3,000 tons of precursor chemicals and 426 pieces of chemical production equipment. But Iraq never accounted for all the 100,000 chemical weapons it produced for use in the Iran-Iraq war, and there are fears that thousands of them, filled with either deadly VX or mustard gas, could be squirreled away.