London Review of Books
... The IISS assessment is an exemplary piece of work. It is clearly written and contains a full history both of the Iraqi programmes and of the UN inspectors' work in demolishing them. On the nuclear side ... it has an authoritative account of the Iraqi programme before and during the Gulf War which should be essential reading for anyone interested in the effectiveness or otherwise of nuclear safeguards. It also contains an account of the 'Crash' programme that Kamel called for in August 1990, just after Iraq had invaded Kuwait. The plan was to use the HEU supplied by France and the Soviet Union to make one bomb. The official IAEA account, quoted by the IISS, is that the Soviet fuel was only 80 per cent U-235 and needed to be further enriched before it could be used. A cascade of fifty centrifuges was planned to achieve this. Hamza's book doesn't mention this, confirming he knew little about the centrifuge programme. He simply says that there was insufficient HEU for a warhead, so the 'apocalypse was postponed.' The HEU was of course safeguarded by the IAEA: the bomb would have had to be constructed before the inspection. But it wasn't to be. The significance of the Crash programme is that it is the source of the IAEA estimate that in 1991 Iraq was only a few months away from a bomb. That may be so, but the estimate has no relevance now since the HEU has been removed from Iraq.
The IISS conclusion, unpopular in Washington, is that 'of the three WMD types, nuclear weapons seem the furthest from Iraq's grasp.' 'We have greater confidence,' the report continues, 'that Iraq's prewar nuclear infrastructure and material assets were effectively accounted for and disarmed by 1998, compared to its prewar CBW capability.' This made the headlines on 10 September in the Financial Times. But most newspapers seized on another conclusion in the nuclear section: 'However, there is a nuclear wildcard. If, somehow, Iraq were able to acquire sufficient nuclear material from foreign sources, it could probably produce nuclear weapons in short order, perhaps in a matter of months.' This conclusion was much more welcome in Washington, and President Bush used it as the focus of his speech to the UN, where the 'matter of months' became 'one year'. In the Government assessment this possibility has extended to 'between one and two years'.
