The Portland Press Herald / The Maine Sunday Telegram

March 10

Nuclear deal for Saddam was bigger than first thought

The Washington Post

As troops massed on his border near the start of the Persian Gulf War, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein weighed the purchase of a $150 million nuclear "package" deal that included not only weapons designs but also production plants and foreign experts to supervise the building of a nuclear bomb, according to documents uncovered by a former U.N. weapons inspector.

The offer, made in 1990 by an agent linked to disgraced Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, guaranteed Iraq a weapons-assembly line capable of producing nuclear warheads in as little as three years. But Iraq lost the chance to capitalize when, months later, a multinational force crushed the Iraqi army and forced Saddam to abandon his nuclear ambitions, according to nuclear weapons expert David Albright, who describes the proposed deal in a new book.

OFFER TAKEN SERIOUSLY

Iraqi officials at the time appear to have taken the offer seriously and asked the Pakistanis for drawings as proof of their ability to deliver, the documents show. "With the assurance of (Iraqi intelligence agency) Mukhabarat ... the offer is not a sting operation," an Iraqi official writes on one of the papers.

Khan's alleged interest in selling nuclear secrets to Hussein has been reported in numerous books and news articles. An internal Mukhabarat memo that surfaced in the late 1990s discussed a secret proposal by one of Khan's agents to sell a nuclear weapons design for an advance payment of $5 million.

But the newly uncovered documents suggest that Khan's offer of nuclear assistance was more comprehensive than previously known. A 1990 letter attributed to a Khan business associate offered Iraq a chance to leap past technical hurdles to acquire weapons capability.

"Pakistan had to spend a period of 10 years and an amount of 300 million U.S. dollars to get it," begins one of the memos. "Now, with the practical experience and worldwide contacts Pakistan has developed, you could have A.B. in about three years' time and by spending about $150 million." "A.B." was understood to mean "atomic bomb," Albright wrote in "Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America's Enemies," released this week.

At the time of the 1990 offer, Iraq was embarked in a crash program to develop nuclear weapons in the face of a threatened U.S.-led attack over its occupation of Kuwait. By that date, Iraqi scientists had acquired a limited amount of weapons-grade enriched uranium but lacked several key components.

FEARS HELP DRIVE WAR

Fears that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program helped propel the United States into a second war with Iraq in 2003, though a U.S. review later determined that Saddam was never able to mount a serious bid for the bomb after 1991.

Aid from the Pakistani scientist could have accelerated Iraq's quest for a weapon if the Iraqi leader had not run out of time, writes Albright, a former U.N. inspector who now heads the nonprofit Institute for Science and International Security. One memo cited in the book promised to provide "all the vital components and materials" needed to make fissile material, and added that "two to three Pakistani scientists could be persuaded to resign and join the new assignment."