Word: uranium
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...position. He said, quite notably, that Israel “might have sincerely believed that” the raid was a strictly defensive maneuver. Meanwhile, revelations from U.S. experts lent credence to this argument. Many State Department and intelligence officials believed that Hussein had obtained sufficient quantities of enriched uranium and specialized equipment to construct a nuclear weapon by the end of 1981—as well as multiple bombs by mid-decade...
...been touring nuclear facilities in several European countries, including Sweden, France, Italy and West Germany. Amazingly, certain Italian officials were also training Iraqi scientists in the use of plutonium-separation technology. In addition, Hussein had threatened to cut off oil exports to Portugal unless its government furnished Iraq with uranium...
That, barring a surprise revelation, is not what the U.S. President is likely to produce this time. Stories will be told, like the one Administration officials are retailing about Iraq's efforts to acquire thousands of specialized aluminum tubes for possible use in centrifuges to enrich uranium. Pictures will be flourished, like the ones of sinister new structures at old nuclear-related sites in Iraq. But it's the inability to know what's under those roofs and what those aluminum tubes are really for that lies at the heart of the Bush Administration's case against Iraq...
...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 of U.N. and U.S. analysts...
...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...