TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/072991/0729001.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.6 KB | 157 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 28

IRAQ

Deja Vu All Over Again


Saddam says he has ended his nuclear shell game, but the U.S. and
its allies draw up a bombing plan just in case

By GEORGE J. CHURCH -- With reporting by William Mader/London and
J.F.O. McAllister/Washington


    Once again, the United Nations Security Council has given
Saddam Hussein a move-or-else deadline. Once again, George Bush
has been lining up international support for military action
and won pledges from Britain and France to join a bombing
campaign.

    So is it deja vu all over again? Perhaps not: this time
the deadline and the threats seem to be working. Saddam ignored
the ultimatum to get out of Kuwait by Jan. 15, but he appears to
be obeying the new demand to disclose by this Thursday, once and
for all, how much of his nuclear bomb-making program remains and
where the machinery and material are hidden. After carrying on
a shell game with U.N. inspectors for months, the Iraqis last
week suddenly began deluging them with information. They even
dug up and displayed devices called calutrons that had been
buried in the desert and led the U.N. team through a once secret
uranium-enrichment plant in the northern Iraqi village of Al
Sharqat.

    Moreover, what the inspectors have found has eased fears
that Iraq is close to developing a deliverable A-bomb. Saddam
had two uranium-enrichment programs going that the U.S. and its
allies never suspected, as well as a third that they did know
about, and his success in hiding them points to a frightening
intelligence failure. But U.N. inspectors believe that even in
January all were pilot programs; large-scale production had not
begun.

    As it turns out, allied bombers destroyed much of the
secret uranium-enrichment machinery -- without quite realizing
what they were doing. A production facility at Tarmiya was
bombed partly because of suspicions that it also had some kind
of connection with hush-hush research, but only in the past few
weeks have U.N. inspectors discovered that the bombs wrecked
calutrons that nobody had known were there. The U.N. team now
thinks Iraq may have produced secretly no more than the 1 lb.
of slightly enriched uranium that it has finally confessed to
having.

    Iraq has, in addition, 98 lbs. of weapons-grade uranium,
produced before Israel destroyed Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981,
but the existence of that uranium has long since been disclosed
to the International Atomic Energy Agency and it is inspected
regularly to determine that it is not being diverted into a
weapons program. Since Baghdad is bound by the cease-fire
resolution to let the U.N. destroy all the enrichment machinery
that has since been discovered, it cannot make much more soon.
A State Department official agrees that Saddam's bomb-building
program "is dead in the water."

    So it seems increasingly unlikely that the bombers will
attack Iraq again after the current deadline expires Thursday.
But there will be trouble of other kinds. Saddam being Saddam,
he can be expected to try to resume a secret bomb-building
program as long as the faintest chance remains that he can get
away with it. Given the failure of allied intelligence to learn
about his calutrons and other dodges, how can the U.S. and
friends be sure even now that he does not have some other
nuclear machinery hidden someplace? The only way to be certain,
say British officials, would be to search literally every
sizable building and cave in Iraq, and even then who would know
what might be buried under the desert sand? Moreover, Iraq has
not yet reported stocks of chemical weapons and missiles that
the U.S. and Britain are sure it has and that are also supposed
to be disclosed by the Thursday deadline and then destroyed. Nor
has Iraq revealed anything about its previously active
biological weapons program.

    The outlook thus is for a long, exasperating struggle in
which Saddam keeps playing cat and mouse and discloses only as
much about his various secret programs as he must, at the last
second, to avoid a new attack. The U.S. and allied strategy will
be to keep pressing for ever-more-intrusive U.N. inspection and
policing. Further, Washington and its friends realize they must
not merely continue to threaten more bombing as a punishment for
any further cease-fire violations, they must mean it. Plans
already drawn, and leaked quietly to make sure Saddam gets the
message, indicate they are serious. According to British
officials, U.S. planes from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and three
aircraft carriers in the region, supplemented by British
fighter-bombers flying from Cyprus, would blast about 25 targets
with laser-guided bombs and missiles; ships might fire cruise
missiles as well. They would hit not only all known and
suspected nuclear sites (British officials say some suspected
sites were not struck during the gulf war and view this as a big
mistake) but also command-and-control centers, airfields and
antiaircraft installations.

    Meanwhile, U.S. and allied intelligence services must try
to explain and rectify a potentially disastrous failure. Even
after the war, and after the U.N. inspectors had arrived in
Iraq, the full dimensions of Saddam's bomb-building program were
still unknown. They were discovered only by a stroke of luck:
an Iraqi engineer defected to the West and disclosed what his
colleagues had been up to.

    Until then, it seems, Western intelligence services had
made the mistake of assuming that Iraqis thought the way they
themselves did. In any hunk of uranium dug out of the earth less
than 1% will be the readily fissionable isotope, U-235; that
must be upgraded to at least 80% in bomb material. Western
scientists long ago settled on high-speed gas centrifuges to do
the enrichment. Intelligence services looked for centrifuges in
countries that they suspected of trying to make nuclear weapons
and found some in Iraq.

    But Saddam's scientists also tried a chemical-separation
process and the calutrons. The U.S. had employed calutrons to
enrich uranium used in the Hiroshima bomb, but then abandoned
the technology because it is very expensive and produces
enriched uranium only slowly and in small quantities. For
Saddam, however, calutrons had advantages. The technology had
been declassified and was discussed freely in scientific
journals. The imported components had legitimate industrial uses
and did not raise eyebrows in the West; better yet, Iraqi
industry could produce most of the necessary components itself.
Calutrons gulp enormous amounts of electricity, and the power
lines to supply it should have been visible in satellite
photographs. But since nobody in the West dreamed that Saddam
would resurrect calutron technology, the interpreters of
satellite pictures, if they saw such evidence, failed to
understand what they were looking at.

    All of which raise a scary question: Might some other
country even now be hiding a nuclear-weapons program? U.S.
officials do not worry too much about more countries using
calutrons. They are so expensive and relatively inefficient as
to be attractive only to a dictator like Saddam, desperate to
get his hands on a bomb at any cost. Nonetheless, says a senior
British diplomat, "what we must do now is provide controls for
every conceivable method of making nukes." At minimum, there
must be a far more extensive and intrusive inspection process
than the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (which Iraq signed)
now provides. Saddam wannabes may be rare, but one would be more
than enough.