Wall Street Journal
WASHINGTON -- Iraq may have completed the design work and experimentation needed to assemble an effective nuclear weapon, but it has failed so far to clear its most difficult hurdle: acquiring the highly enriched uranium necessary to make a nuclear device explode.
Iraq appears to be years away from being able to produce such material on its own, according to experts who are trying to monitor its weapons program. The one prospect that might help Saddam Hussein get the bomb sooner would be to acquire on the black market -- rather than by refining through its own enrichment program -- a batch of weapons-grade uranium.
The most likely source would be nations of the former Soviet Union, where tons of the rare metal are believed to remain unaccounted for. Such an acquisition might enable the Iraqis to complete a nuclear device much more quickly, perhaps even within months.
"It is very, very difficult to find fissile [explodable] material," said Terence Taylor, the head of the Washington office of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an independent research center based in London. "Iraq has a lot of money and a dedicated procurement network. It's possible, but not easy," he said Monday.
The institute released a report on the Iraqi program that says the consensus of most experts outside the U.S. government is that since 1998, when U.N. inspectors announced that most of the nation's sprawling nuclear-weapons program had been destroyed, Iraq hasn't been able to construct its own manufacturing facility for producing highly enriched uranium.
The question of how close Iraq is to nuclear-weapons capability has become central to the burgeoning debate over whether to take military action to topple Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration has increasingly pointed to Iraq's quest for nuclear weapons, more than any other rationale, to explain the president's call for "regime change" in Iraq.
The international sources of technological help for Iraq remain a mystery that has only been partially solved by Western experts. Gary Milhollin, head of the Washington-based Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, which also monitors the Iraqi program, says United Nations weapons inspectors found that Iraq had obtained a workable bomb design that may have come from China through Pakistani scientists. The design requires 33 pounds to 40 pounds of highly enriched uranium and could yield the explosive force that incinerated most of Hiroshima in 1945.
The critical item that gives the weapon its explosive power is highly enriched uranium, a concentration of U-235, a rare isotope or chemical relative of natural uranium that requires an elaborate manufacturing process to separate and produce. Only 0.7% of natural uranium consists of U-235. So-called bomb-grade highly enriched uranium requires a concentration of at least 80%.
Separating and concentrating U-235 is a laborious, money- and time-consuming process that cost the U.S. hundreds of millions of dollars during World War II, when it was a major part of the Manhattan Project that produced the nation's first nuclear weapons. Over the years, the enrichment process has become somewhat easier, and Iraq is currently working on at least two pathways toward achieving it.
Gary Samore , the editor of the International Institute for Strategic Studies report, thinks Baghdad is trying to develop a facility that uses hundreds of high-speed centrifuges to separate U-235 from heavier elements in the uranium molecule. "Of all the technological options, this one is easiest to conceal," he said.
Since Iraq ejected U.N. inspectors in 1998, the best window U.S. intelligence agencies have had into the Iraqi nuclear-weapons program, said Mr. Milhollin, has been its international efforts to procure exotic, high-strength types of aluminum and steel needed to keep the centrifuges from spinning apart.
In the second approach to refining highly enriched uranium, Iraq might use "calutrons," or large electromagnetic separating machines, which U.N. inspectors found and destroyed in the country in the 1990s. But Western experts aren't sure whether Iraq has resumed the work. The process is inefficient and was rejected by U.S. nuclear scientists after World War II.
That leaves the option of trying to smuggle in highly enriched uranium. Moving such toxic material would be difficult. But there's no guarantee a shipment would be spotted. The amounts involved aren't large, and the U.S. isn't able to specifically detect radioactive material from satellite imagery.
Mr. Milhollin noted that Iraq has two capabilities that work to its advantage in trying to field a completed, deliverable warhead. "They still have the knowledge" of how to build weapons, he said. "And they've become very adept at hiding their activities from overhead cameras. They've learned what we can see."
Delivering a bomb would be another hurdle for Iraq, but experts believe that would be easier than making the weapon.
