TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=90TT3293> <title> Dec. 10, 1990: When Will Saddam Get The Bomb? </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990 Dec. 10, 1990 What War Would Be Like </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> NATION, Page 38 When Will Saddam Get the Bomb? </hdr> <body> Not nearly so soon as the Bush Administration claims By WILLIAM R. DOERNER--Reported by James O. Jackson/Bonn and Jay Peterzell/Washington Of all the rationales George Bush has offered for going to war with Iraq, only one has proved persuasive to a majority of Americans. That is the need to prevent an unpredictable and power-mad Saddam Hussein from obtaining nuclear weapons. The Bush Administration has been harping on that threat since Nov. 20, when a New York Times poll found that 54% of those questioned agreed that stopping Saddam from joining the nuclear club was a valid reason for offensive military action. Protecting U.S. oil supplies, by contrast, was judged a sufficient cause for resorting to force by only 31%. The President and other key government members have repeatedly argued that Iraq's 15-year effort to develop nukes could succeed within the next few months. "Those who would measure the timetable for Saddam's atomic program in years may be seriously underestimating the reality of that situation," Bush declared during his Thanksgiving Day visit to the troops in Saudi Arabia. That Saddam intends to develop a nuclear arsenal is doubted by no one. He has openly bragged that Iraq will be the first Arab nation to wield an atom bomb. But most experts--including those in the Administration--believe that Bush is greatly overstating the immediate danger posed by Iraq's nuclear arms program. Soon after Iraq invaded Kuwait, U.S. intelligence officials conducted an emergency review of their earlier assessment that Saddam is five to 10 years away from developing nuclear arms by enriching uranium ore to bomb-grade levels. "The sense was, `My God, this guy's a maniac; he'll do anything. Is there any way we haven't thought of he could get the Bomb?'" says an official. The panel came up with only one scenario: Iraq might have enough bomb-grade fuel on hand to fashion a single low-yield atomic weapon in a period of several months to several years. The interagency group stuck with its earlier estimate of five to 10 years for any larger weapons program, primarily because Iraq still lacks the facilities for converting uranium ore to weapons-grade uranium 235. "I don't know of anyone who disagrees with the consensus that enrichment is a long-term threat, not an immediate one," says an intelligence official. "You can't bomb their enrichment or weapons-fabrication plants, because they don't exist." Iraq might have obtained nuclear arms by now if its relentless efforts had not been thwarted. In 1977 the country began installing a French Osirak-model nuclear reactor, ostensibly for research projects, at El-Tuwaitha, 10 1/2 miles southwest of Baghdad. Four years later, convinced that the reactor's real purpose was to produce plutonium to be chemically reprocessed and used for weapons, Israel bombed the facility to rubble. After the Osirak attack, Iraq tried to realize its ambitions by buying bomb-grade material from underground suppliers. In 1982 Iraqi agents paid $60 million to a team of Italian-based smugglers who claimed to have access to stores of plutonium and highly enriched uranium. According to U.S. officials, the smugglers' offer was a fraud, and the Iraqis walked away from it empty-handed. Stung by those setbacks, Baghdad turned to a third means of joining the nuclear club: the enrichment of uranium to weapons-grade level in gas centrifuges. The centrifuges take uranium-bearing ore or a mixture called yellowcake and separate out the 3% of uranium 235, which is fissionable, from the 97% of uranium 238, which is not. Iraq is known to possess 250 tons of yellowcake, most of it purchased in the 1970s from Brazil, China and Niger. In recent years the country has also begun producing its own yellowcake from mines in northern Iraq. The effort has been impeded because virtually no country capable of manufacturing centrifuges is willing to sell them to Iraq. Baghdad has thus embarked on a strategy of purchasing the technology and materials necessary to construct its own centrifuges. Tales abound of secretive transfers of nuclear-related technology--some completed and some prevented--between Western countries and Iraq. Two years ago, a British engineering firm in Coventry, Matrix-Churchill International, was found by British customs to have exported precision lathes and supplied training to Iraqi engineers. There was nothing illegal about either transaction. In March a joint Anglo-American sting operation foiled an attempt by Iraqi agents to ship to Iraq through London's Heathrow Airport U.S.-made electronic capacitors that could be used in a nuclear bomb. To some experts, the capacitor discovery was a chilling indication that Iraq might be on the verge of building a nuclear bomb. Says Paul Beaver, publisher of the authoritative Jane's Defense Weekly: "Saddam is getting close to when he will need that part of the nuclear mechanism." Other experts strongly disagree. U.S. intelligence officials, despite the Administration's alarms, insist that Iraq is not on a fast track to being able to produce anything more than a single low-yield device. Only a few dozen scientists appear to be engaged in Iraq's nuclear program, in contrast to a work force of several thousand in Pakistan. To produce the 22 lbs. of fissionable material needed for a bomb, Iraq would need 1,000 operating centrifuges. Furthermore, since the centrifuges process the uranium in a "cascade" operation that requires multiple transfers of the gas, they would have to be sited in a single giant plant that could not be hidden. No such facility has been detected by U.S. spy satellites, and current intelligence estimates put the number of centrifuges acquired by Iran at about two dozen. With that number, says Mark Hibbs, European editor of Nucleonics Week, it would take eight to 10 years to produce enough U-235 for one bomb. But nuclear Cassandras point out that Saddam possesses enough fissionable material to build a bomb: 27 lbs. of highly enriched U-235 taken from the Osirak plant's salvaged core, as well as about 20 lbs. of less pure fuel obtained earlier from the Soviets. That uranium could be used for an implosion bomb, similar to the one the U.S. dropped on Nagasaki. There is no evidence, however, that Iraq has tried to convert the core into an explosive device. When Iraq purchased the uranium from France in 1975, Baghdad agreed to place it under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a Vienna-based nonproliferation watchdog group. IAEA inspectors perform tests on Iraq's stash twice yearly. Last week the agency certified that the latest round, conducted from Nov. 19 to 22, showed "no change" in either the amount or the purity of the uranium. Should the Iraqis elect to tamper with the uranium in the future, U.S. experts estimate, the process of turning it into a bomb would take a minimum of several months. Since an IAEA inspection might occur within that period, a diversion could be detected before an Iraqi nuclear bomb became a fait accompli. Even if Saddam's scientists succeeded in using the salvaged core to make a bomb, most U.S. experts believe it would be so bulky that it could not be launched by any missile or bomber Iraq possesses, and would thus have to be delivered to its detonation site by truck. Moreover, since Iraq has only enough fissionable material to produce one bomb, it could not test it to make sure it would work. Although U.S. officials believe Iraq does not pose an imminent nuclear threat, they do not necessarily dismiss the wisdom of a continuing technological embargo and even a military strike to deter Saddam's atomic program before it gets much further. They argue that the reckless Iraqi leader might use or threaten to use nuclear weapons if he ever obtains them. But an attack to prevent this, says an Administration official, would be a "preventative war, not a pre-emptive one. It doesn't explain why you go to war this month as opposed to six months from now." Or why it is necessary to exaggerate the threat in the first place. </body> </article> </text>