TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/121090/1210102.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.3 KB | 170 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 38

When Will Saddam Get the Bomb?


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.