Agence France Presse - September 9th 2002
Iraq could with foreign help in just a matter of months make nuclear weapons to back up its deadly stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, a London-based think tank said Monday.
In a 78-page report, based in part on input from former UN arms inspectors, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said the world has a "pressing duty" to tackle Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
"The retention of WMD capacities by Iraq is self-evidently the core objective of the regime," said IISS director John Chipman. "It has sacrificed all other other domestic and foreign policy goals to this singular aim."
"Sooner or later, it seems likely that the current Iraqi regime will eventually achieve its objectives," he said.
On the basis of available data, Iraq could put together nuclear weapons "within months" if it got its hands on fissible material -- enriched urananium or plutonium -- from another country, the IISS report said.
In addition, Iraq probably has a dozen al-Hussein missiles with a range of 650 kilometres (400 miles), that could hit targets in Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Kuwait, it said.
Such missiles could be fitted with chemical and biological warheads, developed from stocks dating back to before the Gulf War in 1991, it said.
Military analysts said the IISS report -- four months in the making -- contained no fresh details on Iraq's weapons programs, four years after President Saddam Hussein threw out UN inspectors.
But it lent credibility to US concerns that Bahgdad is pursuing the development of weapons of mass destruction, although it stopped short of endorsing Washington's call for "regime change".
The report's timing was key as well, coming out three days before US President George W. Bush goes before the UN General Assembly in New York to rally international support for his hard line against Saddam.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush's closest ally in Europe on Iraq, who aims to release his own government's assessment of the Iraqi threat, called the IISS report "significant."
"It paints a powerful picture of a highly unstable regime, with access to biological and chemical weapons," the spokesman said. "We are not talking obviously about washing powder here."
According to the IISS report:
-- "There is general agreement that Iraq is very unlikely to have achieved the ability to produce sufficient fissile material for nuclear weapons since the end of (UN) inspections in 1998.
"
--"If, somehow, Iraq were able to acquire sufficient nuclear material from foreign sources, it could probably produce nuclear weapons on short order, perhaps in a matter of months."
--"It is not known for certain whether Iraq has resumed production of fresh BW (biological warfare) ingredients, but it seems a safe bet that it has, or will, in the face of an impending attack."
--"Irag's current CW (chemical warfare) capability probably comprises hundreds of tonnes of agent (presumably a mixture of mustard and nerve agent, most likely sarin and cyclosarin and perhaps VX) and perhaps a few thousand munitions."
--"Iraq probably has a small number of (al-Hussein) missiles, or components for such missiles. Some worst-case assessments put this number at several dozen missiles; a more likely figure is around a dozen. By converting civilian trucks, Iraq is capable of building mobile launchers for these missiles."
In the event of war, the IISS report said Iraq's conventional military forces would be "no match" to the United States and any allies with which it might go into battle.
"But depending on their determination to continue the fight, they could inflict considerable casualties in street-to-street fighting and cause disruption through sabotage and terrorist attacks," it said.
