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Scientists say bomb makers lied to Saddam

"There was no point in trying to revive this program. There was no material, no equipment, no scientists."

Sabah Abdul Noor, former bomb designer

Iraqi scientists never revived their long-dead nuclear bomb program, and in fact lied to Saddam Hussein about how much progress they were making before US-led attacks shut the operation down for good in 1991, Iraqi physicists say.

Before that first Gulf War, the chief of the weapons program resorted to "blatant exaggeration" in telling Iraq's president how much bomb material was being produced, key scientist Imad Khadduri writes in a new book.

Other leading physicists, in Baghdad interviews, said the hope for an Iraqi atomic bomb was never realistic. "It was all like building sand castles," said Abdel Mehdi Talib, Baghdad University's dean of sciences.

Seven months after a US-British invasion toppled Saddam's Baath Party government, Iraqi scientists have grown more vocal in countering Bush administration claims, used to justify the war, that Baghdad had "reconstituted" nuclear weapons development, and that it once was a mere six months from making a bomb.

At best, Khadduri writes, it would have taken Iraq several years to build a nuclear weapon if the 1991 war and subsequent UN inspections had not intervened.

His self-published Iraq's Nuclear Mirage, a chronicle of years of secret weapons work and of a final escape into exile, is part of this senior scientist's emergence from a low profile in Canada -- intended to refute what he calls a "massive deception" in Washington that led the US into war.

Months of searching by hundreds of US experts have found no trace of nuclear, chemical or biological wea-pons in Iraq, just as UN inspectors found none before the war. No Iraqi scientists have confirmed the programs were revived in recent years.

Khadduri, a US- and British-educated physicist, writes that he did theoretical work on nuclear wea-pons as long ago as the mid-1970s, after joining Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission. By the late 1980s, as the secret bomb program accelerated, he was in a pivotal position as coordinator of all its scientific and engineering information.

The UN inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who dismantled the bomb program after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 war, saw Khadduri as a key source and conducted an all-day interview with him earlier this year in Toronto, where he has resided since 1998.

Iraq's Nuclear Mirage, available via online booksellers, dismisses the US contention that the atom-bomb establishment was somehow resurrected after the IAEA demolished it, UN inspectors were stationed in Iraq and Iraqi specialists were scattered.

"Where is the scientific and engineering staff required for such an enormous effort?" he asks. "Where are the buildings and infrastruc-ture?"

The continuing US weapons hunt amounts to no more than "investigating mirages," he says.

An ex-bombmaker still in Iraq is just as dismissive of the unsubstantiated US allegations.

"There was no point in trying to revive this program. There was no material, no equipment, no scientists," former bomb designer Sabah Abdul Noor said in a recent interview at Baghdad's Technology University.

"Scientists were scattered and under the eyes of inspectors, totally scattered. To do a project, you have to be together."

Talib, the newly elected university dean, was an anti-Baathist who didn't participate in the bomb program, but was close to many who did. They vastly oversold their accomplishments before 1991, the physicist said.

"They put a lot of lies on Saddam Hussein," he said in a Baghdad interview. "They took a lot of money out of him through what you call, in English, bluffing." When their installations were finally demolished, it "saved their necks" by burying their mistakes, he said. "They could tell Saddam: `There's nothing left.'"

Khadduri, in his core position in the program, could attest to the overselling.

He writes that when he transferred top-secret documents of bomb program chief Jafar Dhia Jafar to an optical disc in 1991, he found the "blatant exaggeration" in a 1990 report to Saddam.

Khadduri and others said the design and actual production of a bomb would have been an extremely difficult task.

It was an impossible quest, "all futility," said one of Baghdad's senior nuclear physicists, Hamed M. al-Bahili.

Al-Bahili, who joined the Atomic Energy Commission in 1968 but remained outside the weapons program, said his colleagues inside "all knew they wouldn't achieve results." As for whether the program was later revived, he said, "these American inspectors are wasting their time."
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