The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  David Kay thought the U.S. bureaucracy’s initial resistance to supporting UNSCOM was defensive. “We had no secure telephones,18 for example, none of any type in Vienna or New York. We had no safes that met government standards for security. We had to go out and buy all these things commercially. The government could have bought them. It was really a standoff. The U.S. military wanted to declare victory and get out of Dodge. They remembered Vietnam and they didn’t want to hang around to see what happened afterward—they were smarter this time.” The State Department was similarly conflicted, Kay said. Ambassador at large Richard T. Kennedy, a non-proliferation specialist and the U.S. representative to the IAEA, “was very, very ambivalent about the inspection process. He took me aside and said, ‘Look, this is a poisoned chalice. You’re not going to get the support you think you’re going to get. It’s going to be harder and they’re going to blame the IAEA’—‘they’ being the U.S. government. Why? Because the Iraqi program originated in part in deals with the French involving commercial nuclear power. Kennedy was closer to the truth than a lot of people have recognized. This was going to be a difficult experience for the IAEA, who would have to explain, if anything was found, how it got there, and for the government, because the government would have to cover its ass.”

  Blix recalls “no frictions with the U.S.,19 nor with the CIA,” but the CIA refused at first to share any information with UNSCOM. “Some other intelligence services did, but the U.S. would not, and I respected that. They probably said to themselves, ‘Why should we? Intelligence is always sensitive; why should we give them anything at all unless we see that they really do some work?’” (Later, Blix told me, after the inspections began to show results, “then they came and they wanted to tell us how we should do our work. Mohamed ElBaradei”—the IAEA’s legal adviser at the time; later Blix’s successor—“said that they shouldn’t try to teach us how to suck eggs.”)

  Some recruiting difficulties were personal, Jere Nichols, the Oak Ridge chemical engineer, recalled. “We were all scared.20 I was, for example, the fourth choice to be the EMIS person, and I didn’t know a whole lot about EMIS [electromagnetic isotope separation]. Two of the three people who did know were older guys. The third said he was basically a coward and didn’t want to do it. Some of the rigors we were told about, which frightened some of us, were: temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius [122° F.] or more; the humidity; the possibility of poison gas remnants from the war; the possibility of unexploded bombs; snakes and scorpions; bacteria in the food and water; spies who searched and placed electronic bugs in our hotel rooms.”

  “I had to go out and lease21 a plane to get to Baghdad,” said David Kay. “Romanian Airlines. They had a Romanian knockoff of the British Aircraft Corporation 111. I’d actually flown a lot on the BAC-111 and I hated it. You never knew if the thing was going to get off the ground. When we took the aircraft, the first thing the Romanian pilot showed us—proudly—was a plaque that said it was the first BAC-111 produced in Romania. It was slow, one of the restrooms was taped shut—it was awful.” The equipment the inspectors pulled together commercially, Kay said, came from “the West Coast version of Crazy Eddie. Two inspectors from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California cleaned out the place so we’d have cameras and communications gear. I took the first digital camera into Iraq. It was a Kodak camera and it cost eleven thousand dollars. Two megapixels or some such. So much of what we did had never been done before. We made up the rules as we went along.”

  “The first few trips required true courage,”22 Gallucci remembered. “For mobility, once we got there, the Iraqis provided these unair-conditioned buses and I rented us a couple of cars from Avis. For medical support—this was a dangerous mission—we had first-aid kits. For secure communications, we used a book cipher—two copies of the same book, with the code designating the location of the word. It takes about three days to decode ‘Hi, Mom,’ but you can do it. It was very crude.” On the first mission Kay led into Baghdad, he said, “the city was still struggling23 with the aftermath of the war. There was one functioning traffic light in the entire city. We had no U.S. military support, and, in fact, the U.S. government had refused to give us almost anything. The vehicles we initially used were diesel-fueled British Land Rovers, and we had a real problem getting fuel.”

  Once they began work, conditions improved. They staged out of an American air base in the micro-kingdom of Bahrain, a small island in the Persian Gulf connected by a causeway to Saudi Arabia. “The inspectors came from all over24 the world,” Gallucci recalled. “Our lift was eventually provided by German C-160s [turboprop military transport aircraft] and our mobility by CH-53s [U.S. marine medium-lift twin-engine helicopters] and Norwegian-supplied SUVs. We had good medical support from New Zealand. The intelligence picture really picked up quickly. The U.S. intelligence community cottoned on to the fact that we were actually walking around Iraq. Someone, someplace in the CIA, figured this out, and all of a sudden we were nearly besieged with intelligence. We built up our staff at headquarters. Within a month or so, headquarters was doing what it was supposed to do. We recruited the specialized teams, did mission planning, conducted briefings, evaluated mission results, created an archive—the offices in Bahrain and Baghdad functioned pretty well.”

  If logistic conditions improved, there was still serious conflict between the IAEA leadership and UNSCOM. Blix felt that UNSCOM meant to treat the agency “as a dog on a leash”25—letting it sniff out the contraband but allowing it no further authority. “An even more serious26 matter,” he wrote later, “was the difference in inspection style between the organizations: to UNSCOM the IAEA inspectors seemed too much like proper civil servants; to the IAEA, some of the UNSCOM inspectors seemed to act Rambo-style.” Blix claimed that the friction made the work unpleasant without reducing its effectiveness. Kay and Gallucci disagree; they think their effectiveness was compromised as well until Blix saw the light.

  By accepting Security Council Resolution 687, Iraq had agreed to disclose fully its WMD programs and stockpiles within fifteen days—that is, by mid-April 1991. In secret high-level meetings in Iraq27 following its capitulation, senior managers of the Iraqi programs for missile, chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons had assembled complete inventories of their programs and materials along with options for how to respond. The documents went to Hussein Kamel, who decided in consultations with Saddam Hussein to declare part of Iraq’s chemical-weapons and missile programs but to conceal its biological- and nuclear-weapons programs. Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, among others, speculated28 later that the biological and nuclear programs were concealed in the hope that Iraq could develop a deterrent against the United States, Iran, and Israel, its three most dangerous enemies.

  “This first declaration29 was rejected by the IAEA because it didn’t contain anything,” Blix’s deputy Dimitri Perricos said. “There was a full denial that anything existed, in terms of any important nuclear material, in Iraq.” Iraq submitted a second declaration on 27 April that “had a little bit more content,30 which at least gave the agency a starting point. Iraq admitted that it did have highly-enriched uranium, which everyone already knew about because it was part of the HEU fuel used in the Tammuz reactor”—a small Russian-supplied reactor. “Iraq also admitted that it had buildings and facilities at Tuwaitha other than those that had been visited by safeguards inspectors.”

  Perricos, a Greek chemist, was the chief inspector for the initial inspection, which went from 15 through 21 May 1991. “The first inspection31 had a very defined objective,” he said later: “to get custody of all the nuclear material in Iraq—find out where the material was located and take control of it so that there would be no danger that the material would disappear.” David Kay handled logistics and delivered the initial briefing but did not accompany the crowd of thirty-four inspectors of twenty different nationalities when it left Bahrain for Baghdad.

  Southeast of Baghdad at Tuwaitha the team was startled by the complex
’s scale, Perricos recalled. “To our surprise, Tuwaitha was32 a very, very large center. It was not just the three or four buildings that safeguards inspectors had visited before the war—the two reactors, a small storage facility, and a small laboratory-scale fabrication plant. We found that there was a whole new area of Tuwaitha where safeguards inspectors had never been before. This area was only known to those people who had access to aerial surveillance. It was in this area, called the new R & D area, where Iraq did most of its clandestine development work.” The extensive complex was now largely ruined, Perricos saw:

  Tuwaitha was very badly damaged by the Gulf War bombardment. The bombing had done its work, but it also caused some difficulties for us, because it gave the Iraqis an excuse to hide a lot of things and tell us that they had been lost during the bombing, hidden by the rubble, or burned.… Some chores were more difficult then others. You had to go through the rubble to try to find out what was there. Inspectors spent a lot of time digging, really digging, into rubble in order to be able to find material or equipment that we were told had been lost in the bombing.

  Searching could be dangerous. “Inspectors had to walk33 carefully among the ruins, because there were still unexploded ordnance. We had explosive ordnance disposal experts who were going ahead, and you had to follow in their steps to avoid getting into danger.”

  The two Tuwaitha reactors—the French reactor the Israelis had bombed in 1981 and the smaller Russian one—were heavily damaged, the team reported, to such an extent that “they would be difficult34 to restore”; in any case, Perricos said, their significant component was their HEU fuel:

  The surprise that we had35 was that the nuclear material was not where it was supposed to be. We spent some time in the beginning—the first days—persuading the Iraqis to tell us where the fresh HEU was located. We found out that the HEU had been removed for storage in the physical protection control bunker at the entrance of Tuwaitha.… Then we looked for the spent [reactor] fuel. We were not able to find any spent fuel, except for that spent fuel that was buried in the rubble at the site. We finally were told by the Iraqis that they had taken all the spent fuel—one [fuel assembly] by one, over a long operation, they said, during the bombardment period—and put all of it in an agricultural farm somewhere closer to Baghdad. In a deserted area, they had dug some holes and they put the fuel assemblies in barrels with water and kept them in there.

  The team confiscated any nuclear materials it located. “We had not only to measure36 the fuel,” Perricos recalled, “we also had to take it under control and eventually, during subsequent inspections, we had to be able to take it and store it in areas where it could later be shipped out of the country.” Besides the reactor fuel, they found large quantities of uranium ore stored near Tuwaitha. “There were hundreds of barrels of yellowcake. Some of this was material that had been imported before the Gulf War. At this particular location … we started to collect all the natural uranium and low-enriched uranium from other locations in Iraq.” A later report37 gives the volume of nuclear materials confiscated in the Tuwaitha area during the first inspection:* 31 kilograms of fresh 72-percent-enriched uranium; 17 kilograms of irradiated 52-percent-enriched uranium; kilogram quantities of uranium enriched to less than 30 percent; an estimated 327 kilograms of natural or depleted uranium buried under the rubble by the bombings; and 204 tons of yellowcake.

  Most of the damage at Tuwaitha had obviously been caused by bombing, the inspectors reported, “but in some significant cases38 by extensive clearing operations carried out by Iraqi authorities during and after the conflict. In almost all cases documentation and records had disappeared and were not available.… It is clear that much of the equipment which once existed at Al-Tuwaitha has been removed to other locations, most of which were not disclosed” to the IAEA inspectors. Despite this plain indication of deceit, the report nevertheless concluded, “The overall impression39 is of a site where most significant buildings have been thoroughly destroyed or cleared and, with only a few exceptions noted below, provide only limited concern for future verification unless substantial rebuilding takes place.”

  When the action team returned to Bahrain, Kay told me, disagreement flared between Blix, Dimitri Perricos, and some of the team members. “Dimitri talked to40 the director general”—i.e., Blix—“and the director general was prepared to have a report that said, ‘There’s nothing there. We’ve looked, there’s nothing there.’ Because that was the belief. I mean, Blix, during the run-up to the war, had told me that there was nothing there and he was confident that the inspection process had worked.” Two American inspectors on the team disagreed. “They said that if the report took that position, they would have to issue a dissenting report, and that would have been a serious embarrassment. So the report just said, ‘We have looked at what the Iraqis gave us and here is what we found.’”

  Fortunately for the investigation, the U.S. intelligence community was watching Iraq from space and the air. While Perricos and his team were digging for contraband at Tuwaitha, Kay recalls, “a photo analyst41 noticed that the Iraqis were clearing stuff out and burying it across the road. He thought they were clearing up the site, so he didn’t tell the team or his superiors. Then, the day the action team left, there happened to be a [high-altitude photo-reconnaissance] U-2 pass over the site and the same photo analyst got the pictures, which is remarkable. He noticed they were unburying things and putting them on trucks and moving them.”

  The analyst had seen similar objects before; again by happenstance, he had reviewed the first poststrike photos from Tarmiya, the mystery site northwest of Baghdad, after it had been bombed during the war, and remembered the “big circular objects” the photos had revealed. Since the end of the war, the intelligence community had observed the objects—massive, discus-shaped metal plates, about fifteen feet in diameter—being moved and buried. They had nicknamed them Frisbees after the plastic disks used in throwing games. “At that point he called42 someone,” Kay says, “and told them, ‘That’s the same shape I saw at Tarmiya.’ This was the initial lightbulb going off. Some people said, ‘Might be related to uranium enrichment,’ and others said, ‘No, the only things that fit that shape are the electromagnets for a calutron process.’ Unfortunately, there were damn few people left around who even thought about calutrons.”

  The calutron (“California University cyclotron”), so named by its developers at the University of California at Berkeley, is a machine for separating isotopes. It was invented at Berkeley early in the Second World War to separate isotopes of uranium for the Manhattan Project. It does so by generating and injecting a beam of electrically charged uranium tetrachloride gas into a vacuum tank that is set between the poles of a powerful electromagnet. Lighter atoms of U235 are displaced more than heavier atoms of U238 and follow a tighter curve around the magnetic field, so that when they arrive at the bucket-like collectors at the other end of the tank, more U235 atoms will be captured in one collector than in the other. By repeating the process with the enriched portion of the product, any level of enrichment is possible up to pure U235. In the Manhattan Project operation, two stages of calutrons produced almost all the highly enriched uranium used in Little Boy, the 13.5-kiloton uranium gun bomb that was detonated over Hiroshima, Japan, on 6 August 1945.

  One American inspector at Tuwaitha was an expert on uranium-enrichment technology. When he and the action team moved on from Tuwaitha north past Baghdad to the even larger site at Tarmiya, they expected to discover a full-scale centrifuge plant for enriching uranium. “The team found that,43 on the whole, the area was in ruins,” Perricos recalled. “In the beginning, they couldn’t make anything out of it; they could not really understand what was happening. They were told that the facility was not important … but the inspectors were extremely skeptical. There was all sorts of new construction and there were walls in the large hall that did not make sense. But one thing was very clear: the facility did not have the profile of a centrifuge enrichment fa
cility.”

  The American expert “didn’t find what44 he was looking for,” Jere Nichols added, “but he did take some very good notes. He sketched the buildings, many of which had been significantly destroyed by bombing and Iraqi demolition, and made notes about the electricity requirements at each.” The team’s formal report described the Tarmiya buildings as “unusual … with unusually large45 installed electrical power co-allocated with buildings with large chemical processing capabilities.… Building 33 was stated by the Iraqis to be used for transformer fabrication.… This is simply not credible.… The building had two ten-ton bridge cranes and two twenty-five-ton bridge cranes, an enormous installed electrical supply (over 100 megawatts) and a supply of purified and chilled water.” Once again, however, the expert was puzzled by the team’s findings.

  Perricos said his inspectors “took hundreds of pictures46 of Tarmiya, and they were collected in Vienna and shown to experts.” One of those experts was a sixty-nine-year-old veteran of the Manhattan Project, John Googin, a down-easter who had taken a chemistry degree at Bates College in his hometown of Lewiston, Maine, in 1944, and plunged immediately into working on electromagnetic isotope separation at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Y-12 EMIS plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. “John’s first assignment,”47 wrote his eulogist, “was the daunting task of recovering and recycling the large fraction of precious uranium 235 that was deposited everywhere except in the product stream”—EMIS is a notoriously wasteful technology, which is why in 1991 it had long been obsolete and nearly forgotten. After the war, when the United States shut down its EMIS plants and moved on to more efficient gaseous diffusion and centrifuge enrichment technologies, Googin earned a Ph.D. in physical chemistry while continuing to work at Oak Ridge in the production of nuclear materials. He knew enrichment technologies from the ground up. “I can still see him48 in Vienna sorting out the pictures,” Perricos said. When Googin finished his analysis, he announced that the process the Iraqis were developing at Tarmiya was electromagnetic isotope separation.