02 November 2000 Saddam Still Pursuing Nuclear Weapons, Says Iraqi Scientist by William B. Reinckens Washington File Correspondent Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's former nuclear weapons expert Khidhir Hamza said Iraq is only months away from making a workable bomb. However, Hamza said Iraq must rely on foreign sources for fissile material. "I don't think that he will keep it a secret," said Hamza. "Once Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction [WMD] program is capable of generating a couple of nuclear devices, Saddam will use it to his own ends," he said. Hamza predicted that Saddam would test one of the devices and then declare himself "a nuclear power." Hamza started working in Iraq's nuclear program in the 1970s after studying physics in the United States; he defected to the West in 1995. Hamza spoke at a book signing reception at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington on November 2. His book, co-authored with Jeff Stein, is entitled "Saddam's Bomb Maker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda." The book was released in the United States November 2 and in Europe in October. The Iraqi scientist related how Saddam Hussein hookwinked the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for years, even though Iraq signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968 and ratified it in 1969. "That [ratification] made our nuclear-power cover stories internationally acceptable and justified our major nuclear purchases with the full backing of the IAEA," Hamza said. Hamza noted that after the Arab armies were defeated in the 1967 War with Israel, Iraq started a nuclear program "to have at least parity with Israel." In 1972, Saddam Hussein approved an initial plan that led to Iraq's acquisition two years later of a nuclear reactor from France for a plutonium bomb, he said. At the time, he said, Iraq's initial investment in the program was $500 million and the program employed 500 technicians. Israel's attack on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor facility in 1981 kicked Saddam's nuclear weapons program into high gear, Hamza said. "Israel made a mistake in hitting the reactor," he said. Saddam responded by launching a new eight-year-long secret program in 1982 to build a nuclear bomb inventory that would eventually cost $10,000 million and employ 7,000 technicians and scientists, Hamza said. Hamza said Saddam was driven by a desire to make Iraq a nuclear power and the center of Arab power and unity. Saddam "needed a crude device to drop on Israel," Hamza said. After the Gulf War in 1991, Iraq continued with its secret nuclear weapons development program, says Hamza. The program was eventually discovered by United Nations inspection teams, who began to dismantle it until they were ordered to leave Iraq at the end of 1998. Hamza's book relates how Iraq tested biological and chemical weapons on human subjects, most of whom were political prisoners, but also on Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south. The Iraqi nuclear expert said that while he was working on the nuclear program, the Iraqi regime recruited Iraqi university students for clandestine WMD programs and "some of the students died due to exposure." Conditions inside Iraq became so bad for the scientists and their families that many fled, said Hamza. One of the problems for Saddam today, he said, "is that no one is returning home" to work on the WMD programs. Hamza asserted that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) tried to recruit him to make a bomb and Baghdad had a secret program aimed at breaking into U.S. and other foreign computer systems. (Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov) Return to the Washington File