TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/070891/0708004.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.9 KB | 122 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 40

DISARMAMENT

How to Hide an A-Bomb


It's actually quite easy, as Iraq is proving: just don't let
anybody know where you're making the stuff

By GEORGE J. CHURCH -- Reported by Jay Peterzell/Vienna


    From outside the Abu Gharib barracks near Baghdad,
inspectors for the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency could
see what one member called "frenzied activity": trucks, cranes
and forklifts moving out heavy, draped objects. But Iraqi
soldiers would not let them in until three days later. By then,
said Hans Blix, head of the IAEA, there was "no longer any trace
of the activities and objects" his people had seen before.

    But there is not much doubt about what the Iraqis were
doing. They were playing an exasperating, and dangerous, shell
game with calutrons, which are World War II-era devices to
enrich uranium so that it can produce a nuclear explosive. The
IAEA concluded after a May inspection that calutrons had been
present and then removed from a nuclear site in Tarmiyah, north
of Baghdad. U.S. intelligence tracked the calutrons to the
barracks and then to the Al Fallujah facility west of Baghdad,
where the U.N. inspectors went last Friday -- only to find once
again trucks carting equipment away. Several inspectors followed
the 60-truck convoy in their car, taking pictures until Iraqi
soldiers fired shots in the air to chase them away.

    The U.N. Security Council denounced the incident as a
violation of the cease-fire agreement that ended the gulf war,
and George Bush thundered, "We can't permit this brutal bully
((Saddam Hussein)) to go back on this solemn agreement." In
theory, the U.S. and its allies could resume air attacks if
Saddam does not turn over the calutrons and any other bombmaking
gear for destruction, as the cease-fire resolution commands. At
minimum, they will continue the trade embargo that is strangling
the Iraqi economy.

    However that comes out, the contretemps spotlights a
broader problem: only the unprecedented rights to prowl
everywhere and look at anything in the country that the U.N.
gained because of the cease-fire have enabled it to expose
Saddam's cheating. If Iraq had to contend with just the regular
inspections of known nuclear facilities, required by the 1970
nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which it signed, it might be
well on the way to reviving a bomb-building program that allied
bombing was intended to interrupt. As recently as last November,
IAEA inspectors toured the nuclear facilities Baghdad
acknowledged possessing and found Iraq to be -- apparently --
in complete compliance.

    Other countries seem to be getting away with bomb-building
programs outside the treaty. All nations party to the pact, as
142 now are, must agree with the IAEA on terms for inspection
of all their nuclear facilities. But North Korea, which signed
the treaty in 1985, has never concluded a full-scope inspection
pact, and South Korean President Roh Tae Woo charged last week
that Pyongyang has tested nuclear detonators. South Africa,
widely believed to have the Bomb, announced last week its
intention to sign the treaty and will now have to open its
facilities to inspection. Countries that do not sign the treaty
on occasion agree to have the U.N. group monitor some of their
nuclear plants. Israel, India and Pakistan are all in this
category, but they nonetheless are believed to have secret
weapons programs under way.

    It is not because the inspectors have been lax. They
employ an impressive array of mechanisms to make sure that
materials used to generate nuclear power or for other peaceful
purposes are not diverted to bomb development. In 21 years, the
inspectors, who lately have run more than 2,000 inspections a
year, have never found even a single case of material diverted
from peaceful use.

    But the inspectors can visit only those facilities they
know about. The way to start a successful bomb-building program
is simply to carry it on at highly secret sites completely
separate from all publicly known power-generation or research
activities. The IAEA does have a theoretical right to conduct
"special inspections" of undeclared plants but only if another
member country supplies intelligence information indicating that
such a nuclear facility exists -- and until the gulf-war
cease-fire that had never happened. Says David Kyd, IAEA
director of information: "If someone wants to engage in
clandestine activity, they're gonna do it." A move will soon be
made, however, to amend the treaty to make such "challenge"
inspections mandatory and not voluntary, as they are now.

    The problems of detecting and stopping production of
chemical and biological weapons are even worse. The U.N. is
supposed to do both in Iraq, and biological weapons are already
banned by a 1975 convention. At present there are no
verification measures, however, and it is hard to see how any
could be made to work. Bacteriological weapons can be produced
in very small labs that are easy to hide.

    Thirty-nine nations are negotiating in Geneva to draft a
treaty banning production, use or stockpiling of chemical
weapons. But verification will probably be frustrating. Chemical
weapons are ridiculously easy to make; even a chemical used in
ink for ball-point pens can readily be treated to form mustard
gas. Verification proposals include "black box" sensors
installed at chemical plants to analyze randomly what is being
produced; another idea is to aim laser infrared radars at
smokestack plumes. While such techniques would not be perfect,
says a U.S. official, "chemical weapons are so difficult to
control that any slowing down of the train is valuable." The
same could be said of nukes. Although it has prevented diversion
of materials from peaceful uses, the IAEA hasn't solved a
tougher challenge: keeping book on the secret bombmakers.