Word: bomb
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Before the Gulf War, U.S. intelligence estimated that Iraq was five to 10 years away from building a nuclear bomb. When the International Atomic Energy Agency team went in after the war, it discovered Saddam was just six months from a crude device. Iraqi scientists had devised a workable weapon design, cobbled together tools and parts and had come very close to refining all of the 44 lbs. of highly enriched uranium necessary to fuel one bomb. But over the next seven years of intrusive watchdogging, Saddam's nuclear program was virtually wiped out, according to a broad range...
Biological weapons present a scarier prospect. Iraq is believed to have fermentation equipment at animal-feed facilities near Baghdad and the ability to convert workaday centrifuges into Cuisinarts for whizzing up lethal agents. But weaponizing most pathogens so that airborne bombs can spray them effectively over large areas remains a challenge for Saddam's engineers. Nonetheless, a gram of anthrax could serve as a poor man's suitcase bomb: that's 1 trillion spores, enough for 100 million fatal doses. Hiding, transporting and disseminating that type of poison is relatively easy: no missiles are needed, just a crop duster, backpack...
...then there is the possibility of a nuclear showdown with Iraq, which the Bush Administration has zeroed in on to make urgent the need for war. In his two red-alert speeches late last month, Vice President Dick Cheney flatly warned that Saddam would acquire an A-bomb "fairly soon." With it, he said, Saddam could "seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supply, directly threaten America's friends and subject the U.S. to nuclear blackmail...
Most experts, including the CIA, say that while Saddam may lust for a bomb, he hasn't got one yet. But he has demonstrated a continued interest in acquiring one. Iraq still has the technical capacity: military officials point to Saddam's continued employment of 200 nuclear Ph.D.s and 7,000 ancillary workers at a secret location near Baghdad, who, the Americans say, perfect bomb designs through low-level R. and D. Inspectors were not able to destroy all of Iraq's nuclear-manufacturing equipment, and U.N. experts say Saddam has been able since 1998 to smuggle in material...
...Saddam is still thought to lack the essential ingredient: fissile material to spark nuclear combustion. Before the Gulf War, Saddam paid German scientists to help assemble hundreds of gas centrifuges to cook bomb-grade enriched uranium from tons of raw ore. The Germans are gone now, and so are nearly all those centrifuges, although both the Atomic Energy Agency and U.S. intelligence say Iraq probably managed to squirrel away a dozen. But even if the Iraqis could put those centrifuges back together without foreign help and operate them around the clock, in five years they still could not distill enough...