Casus Belli

As predicted in this blog over a year ago, there is evidence that Iraq had dismantled its nuclear weapons program - but retained the knowledge to reconstitute it when the coast was clear.

With a hat tip to Ed, I note a new book by a former Iraqi weapons scientist.

This should only be news to you if you get your information from the mainstream media:

In The Bomb in my Garden, Dr Obeidi details Saddam’s quest for a nuclear bomb: "Although Saddam never had nuclear weapons at his disposal, the story of how close Iraq came to developing them should serve as a red flag to the international community."

In the book, published tomorrow, Dr Obeidi details his research through nearly a quarter of a century under Saddam, including the designs for key components and prototypes for nuclear production, buried in a plastic drum next to his rose garden. Probably just two of Saddam’s most trusted deputies knew the whereabouts of the research, he says.

While only the former president knows fully why he did not restart his nuclear programme, Dr Obeidi believes Saddam may have realised the scope of the massive undertaking. UN inspectors had dismantled the programme, removed stockpiles of enriched uranium and exposed Iraq’s international network of suppliers - and Saddam was doing well from the UN’s oil-for-food programme, while increasing his control over a population reliant on him for basics.

To get caught importing the components needed to produce a nuclear weapon, the scientist says, would have ended the programme. Yet Saddam kept his Iraq Atomic Energy Commission running, apparently without weapons programmes, as late as 2003.

"All we had left was the knowledge in our heads and the documents buried in my garden," Dr Obeidi writes.

In a forthcoming report, US weapons inspectors with the Iraq Survey Group are expected to conclude that Saddam had intentions of reinvigorating his weapons programmes, but no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

Ed draws the logical conclusion:

It should also teach the world about the futility of so-called "inspections regimes" when dealing with fundamentally hostile and dangerous dictators. Saddam had long dreamed of creating an Iraq-centered pan-Arab political entity that would challenge both East and West and, through a monopoly on oil, control the world. But oil alone would not secure Saddam's Greater Arabia, and so he tried to build WMD in order to counter the power of the Americans, and to a lesser extent his Russian and Chinese sponsors.

Remember - building nuclear weapons was a Nobel-Prize activity 60 years ago. Today, it's basic craftsmanship. The knowledge and the material are the only things separating a tinpot dictator from the nuclear club.

Hussein had the knowledge. And he had the money to buy the material.

Posted by Mitch at September 25, 2004 10:36 AM | TrackBack