Word: uranium
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Soon after Iraq invaded Kuwait, U.S. intelligence officials conducted an emergency review of their earlier assessment that Saddam is five to 10 years away from developing nuclear arms by enriching uranium ore to bomb-grade levels. "The sense was, 'My God, this guy's a maniac; he'll do anything. Is there any way we haven't thought of he could get the Bomb?' " says an official. The panel came up with only one scenario: Iraq might have enough bomb-grade fuel on hand to fashion a single low-yield atomic weapon in a period of several months to several...
After the Osirak attack, Iraq tried to realize its ambitions by buying bomb- grade material from underground suppliers. In 1982 Iraqi agents paid $60 million to a team of Italian-based smugglers who claimed to have access to stores of plutonium and highly enriched uranium. According to U.S. officials, the smugglers' offer was a fraud, and the Iraqis walked away from it empty- handed...
Stung by those setbacks, Baghdad turned to a third means of joining the nuclear club: the enrichment of uranium to weapons-grade level in gas centrifuges. The centrifuges take uranium-bearing ore or a mixture called yellowcake and separate out the 3% of uranium 235, which is fissionable, from the 97% of uranium 238, which is not. Iraq is known to possess 250 tons of yellowcake, most of it purchased in the 1970s from Brazil, China and Niger. In recent years the country has also begun producing its own yellowcake from mines in northern Iraq...
...dozen scientists appear to be engaged in Iraq's nuclear program, in contrast to a work force of several thousand in Pakistan. To produce the 22 lbs. of fissionable material needed for a bomb, Iraq would need 1,000 operating centrifuges. Furthermore, since the centrifuges process the uranium in a "cascade" operation that requires multiple transfers of the gas, they would have to be sited in a single giant plant that could not be hidden. No such facility has been detected by U.S. spy satellites, and current intelligence estimates put the number of centrifuges acquired by Iran at about...
...nuclear Cassandras point out that Saddam possesses enough fissionable material to build a bomb: 27 lbs. of highly enriched U-235 taken from the Osirak plant's salvaged core, as well as about 20 lbs. of less pure fuel obtained earlier from the Soviets. That uranium could be used for an implosion bomb, similar to the one the U.S. dropped on Nagasaki...