On The (Paper) Trail

The Al-Aukhaider ammunition dump sits next to an old mud fort in the desert, about 100 miles outside Baghdad, with only camels for company — unless U.N. weapons inspectors come calling. On their second visit, last week, the inspectors found 11 rocket warheads, which, portable X-ray machines revealed, were designed to deliver chemical weapons. (Sources say they may have been designed to carry nerve gas.) The warheads, which sources tell TIME were in good condition but had probably never been loaded with chemicals, appear to have been imported into Iraq in the 1980s but had been moved only recently to their present site. Iraqi officials claimed that last month they had declared the existence of the rockets, prohibited under U.N. Security Council resolutions. Sources tell TIME that, extraordinarily, neither the U.N. nor the U.S. has yet translated the whole of the Iraqi declaration, but the CIA is sure that the rockets were not mentioned in it.

American and British officials were more excited about another exercise by the inspectors the same day. British sources say about a thousand pages of documents relating to Iraqi weapons programs were seized, under protest, after inspectors visited the homes of two scientists in Baghdad. White House officials said the documents deal with nuclear programs; Mohamed ElBaradei, the U.N.'s chief nuclear inspector, later indicated that the trove includes details of an old enriched-uranium project. There may be more such discoveries ahead. Both the British and the Americans are giving the inspectors intelligence leads (the British claim responsibility for the discovery of the chemical warheads) and believe that the combination of Iraqi intransigence and rigorous, informed inspections will soon convince international opinion that only military force will compel Saddam Hussein to disarm.