Defector says Iraq close to having nuclear bomb

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Iraq has designed a crude nuclear bomb and has the equipment to build it but lacks the necessary uranium or other fissile material, a former Iraqi nuclear physicist who defected said Thursday.

"I would say (a bomb of) a few kilotons can be done in Iraq now," said Khidhir Hamza, who once headed Iraq's nuclear weapons design program. The bomb would probably be too bulky to be fired on a missile, but could be transported by an airplane and dropped on a target, he said.

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"The design was considerably improved after the (1991) Gulf War," Hamza said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Right now I don't know if they have the uranium, but the design is there."

The construction of the bomb would probably take a few months and it would also have to undergo another process, called hardening, to transport it safely, said Hamza, whose book "Saddam's Bombmaker," was recently published.

A U.S. intelligence official said Iraq currently does not have the infrastructure to build a nuclear bomb. "We don't believe they have the fissile material," he added.

If Iraqi President Saddam Hussein started his own program to develop fissile material, a key ingredient for nuclear weapons like separated plutonium or highly-enriched uranium, it would take two or three years to complete, Hamza said.

"Or he can get some from abroad if he can, then he will have it immediately," Hamza said, suggesting Russia might be a potential supplier.

If Iraq built more than one nuclear weapon, Saddam would probably not keep it secret, he said. "He'll test one, declare himself a nuclear power, and get the whole region polarized in his direction," Hamza said.

Iraq initiated its nuclear weapons program in the early 1970s to be on par with Israel, and in 1974 Hamza and other Iraqi scientists went to France and purchased a nuclear reactor which was to be monitored by the French atomic energy agency.

Then Israel "made a mistake" by bombing the reactor in 1981, relieving Saddam of the monitoring, Hamza said. In 1982 Saddam started a secret nuclear program that was more ambitious and bigger than the original, he added.

Hamza said in his book that it became apparent to him during debriefings by the CIA that Iraq had persuaded U.N. inspectors that Baghdad's nuclear effort had never progressed beyond basic research, that the bomb-design center was a materials research facility and that equipment to make explosives had been destroyed.

"I informed them it (the equipment) had been removed a week before the allied (Gulf War) bombing," the book said.

The CIA appeared surprised that Iraq learned through a Hungarian connection to manufacture nuclear triggers and about the role of two German firms in supplying Iraq with equipment and components, the book said.

The book describes Hamza's escape from Baghdad in 1994 and efforts to defect to the United States which finally succeeded at the U.S. embassy in Budapest in August 1995. His one nonnegotiable demand was that in return for information his wife and children must be extracted from Iraq.

In October 1995 his oldest son was sitting in a Baghdad coffee shop when a "deranged looking man in rags" approached and started muttering as if begging but then whispered his son's name when he got close, the book says.

The son walked away and the beggar followed and when it appeared no one else was around, the beggar handed the son a letter from Hamza and told him to be in Mosul the next day.

The family was hidden by members of the Kurdish opposition until Rick Francona, an Air Force intelligence officer, and "a tall blond CIA man" arrived and got them out and on a flight to Germany, where they lived in CIA safe houses for months waiting for clearance to go to the United States, the book said.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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