The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  But even Googin’s expert conclusion was not yet enough to overcome the UNSCOM leadership’s incredulity that any nation would appropriate a fifty-year-old technology when far more efficient methods of uranium enrichment were available—missing the point that EMIS was a better fit to a marginal industrial structure than more sophisticated (and correspondingly more difficult to construct and operate) technologies might be, and that buying its more commonplace components abroad was less likely to trigger export controls.

  David Kay remembered the day he realized that most of the IAEA inspectors had never heard of a calutron. Kay said that one of the IAEA team leaders, Mauricio Zifferero, an Italian, “may have had a dim49 memory of it, but no one else at the IAEA knew what calutrons were.” Kay had carried a copy of my 1987 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb with him into Bahrain. It discusses EMIS technology at length and includes a schematic drawing of a calutron. He showed it to Zifferero and his IAEA colleagues. “I said, ‘Well, look, I’ll explain—here it is, it’s in the book.’ Because they were extraordinarily skeptical,” Kay said. That was my small contribution to Iraq’s disarming.

  By the beginning of June 1991 the inspectors had returned to the United States, where one of them learned that an Iraqi defector had identified EMIS as the technology Iraq was developing to enrich uranium. “We analyzed all the available50 information for about two weeks,” Jere Nichols recalled, “and prepared a document concluding that Tarmiya, and Ash Sharqat”—another site far up in Iraq’s northern desert—“by extension, were large-scale EMIS production plants.”

  Nichols and his colleagues presented their EMIS findings to Ekéus, Gallucci, and other UNSCOM leaders on 12 June. “One of the intelligence51 people was a lawyer,” Nichols remembered; “he presented all of the information in the form of a case that he concluded would convict Iraq in an international court. The other two intelligence people presented incriminating overhead photography and a summary of information derived from the defector. I presented information derived from building layouts and electric power [supplies] and estimates of the uranium-235 production capacity of the plants at Tarmiya and Ash Sharqat.” Googin made a similar presentation to the IAEA in Vienna on the same day.

  Three days later, Bob Gallucci and Mauricio Zifferero led a team of UNSCOM and IAEA inspectors back into Iraq to begin a second round of inspections, armed this time with strong evidence that Saddam Hussein’s government was covertly enriching uranium in violation of its commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Still unanswered was a graver question: Were the Iraqis also working on an atomic bomb?

  * Uranium enriched to above 80 percent U235 is considered bomb-grade; uranium enriched to above 90 percent U235 is considered highly enriched (HEU). All of the Tuwaitha materials would therefore require further enrichment to be used in nuclear weapons.

  FOUR FOLLOWING THE CALUTRON TRAIL

  THE OVERHEAD IMAGERY that the Gallucci-Zifferero team had seen had placed the EMIS Frisbees—the massive magnet iron calutron disks, fifteen feet in diameter and each weighing some sixty tons—at a large military base twenty miles west of Baghdad, out past war-damaged Saddam International Airport at Abu Ghraib. “We got on our bus1 and rode out there on June 23,” Jere Nichols said, “but the Iraqis had blocked the road in that particular area and they just wouldn’t let us in. They said that they didn’t have permission to do that.” The inspectors were reduced to photographing boxed material through a fence.2 They spent the next day “running around Tuwaitha,” Nichols said, “trying to get permission to go back.”3

  The time at Tuwaitha wasn’t wasted. American intelligence had passed along a tip, Bob Gallucci recalled, “that it might be a good idea4 to go to a particular site, the ‘grove site,’” not far from there:

  We had, as it turned out, nothing much to do at Tuwaitha. We knew the facility; the IAEA people knew Tuwaitha particularly well. So I said I wanted to go to this nearby site, and so we went. I was looking for a particular building, and I had made a sketch of where I thought the building was. And they told me, very hesitantly, that I did not want to go there, because that building was an automobile maintenance facility, and it is now an empty automobile maintenance facility. So I said: “That sounds really interesting, and I would love to see what that looks like, because I’ve not seen one of those in Iraq.”

  So we went down there, and it was, indeed, a big, empty, open garage-like area. But there were very large overhead cranes at the facility, and that was strange. They were large enough, as one of my colleagues said, to take a two-and-a-half-ton dump truck and turn it upside down to drain the oil out. So it didn’t look like an automobile maintenance facility. On one side of the crane, I saw some Arabic writing, and I was going to get one of our interpreters. But I walked around to the other side and I didn’t need the interpreter, because stenciled there in English was “Atomic Energy Commission of Iraq.” … This turned out to be a magnet test-stand facility for the EMIS program.

  What the action team had found was equipment for winding and testing large electromagnets, for which the soft iron Frisbee disks would serve as cores. “I had brought5 a magnetometer,” Nichols recalled, “and used it to measure magnetic fields in the building. The magnetometer went off scale, indicating a very high magnetic field in many places including the bridge crane above the suspected winding machine. My watch stopped in this building and didn’t run again until we returned home and I sent it to the manufacturer.”

  BRIDGE CRANE

  An electric current generates a magnetic field around the wire that carries it. If the wire is wrapped around a core of magnetizable metal such as iron, cobalt, or nickel, it induces a magnetic field in turn in the core. Soft iron—pure iron without alloy—doesn’t retain its magnetism when the electric current is shut off, but many metals do. The intense magnetic field generated in testing the calutron electromagnets had induced permanent magnetism in the steel crane; the magnetized crane, in turn, had magnetized Nichols’s stainless-steel watch. But where were the Frisbees?

  David Kay had joined the team by then. When the Iraqis had denied entry to Abu Ghraib, Maurizio Zifferero had gone to New York to inform the U.N. Security Council; Kay had replaced him as acting chief inspector. Kay’s action team finally received permission to visit the storage area on Wednesday, 26 June 1991. It was predictably empty, Nichols recalled, “just a dusty area6 with a few pieces of loading machinery around, and poor, tired Iraqi soldiers sleeping out on cots in the heat. Over those two days, those poor men had moved all of that metal somewhere else.”

  Accumulating satellite images and U-2 photographs, the intelligence agencies supporting UNSCOM decided that they had a hard fix on where the Frisbees might be—at a place called Fallujah, out beyond Abu Ghraib. The problem for Kay was how to get there when Blix expected them to give the Iraqis advance notice and the Iraqis were blocking them from sensitive sites. A meeting was scheduled with an Iraqi minister for Thursday night to give notice of where the team next intended to inspect. “We quite literally wrote the script7 for Fallujah while walking through Baghdad back alleys after midnight,” Jay Davis would tell a Congressional committee. “Decidedly not the IAEA style.” Kay told me he “took a walk beforehand8 with a couple of the inspectors and hashed it out. I said, ‘Look, in my experience working abroad, the hardest thing to acquire in another language is prepositions. So what I’m going to tell the Iraqis tonight is that we’re going to Abu Ghraib. Odds are, they’ll assume we want to see Abu Ghraib, and since we’ve inspected it before, they’ll be happy to let us go there.’ So sure enough, I met with the Iraqi minister that night and said, ‘Tomorrow morning we will be conducting an inspection to Abu Ghraib.’ Fine, no problem.”

  In the heat of Friday morning the eighteen-member action team and its minders set out together for the base, the Iraqis leading the way, Kay behind them in a Land Rover “with the steering wheel on the wrong side and a crapped-out fuel gauge,” his inspectors following in a bus. “My communications of
ficer and driver was a Kiwi—a New Zealander—absolutely first-rate guy. I told him, we’ll follow them to the checkpoint, but as soon as we get through the checkpoint I want you to cut in front of the Iraqis and floorboard it. We’ve only got about five miles from there to get to where we’re really going.” At the checkpoint, as ordered, the driver raced ahead. “The Iraqis were a little bit slow to react. They started honking horns and giving chase and we just kept going. We followed directions and got to the place, but the photo interpreters had identified it as being on the right side of the road. Funny business, how they do things. They’d studied the photos upside down and they’d forgotten to make the translation when they wrote their directions. Stuff started appearing on the wrong side of the road. We went about a quarter mile too far before I figured out the problem. It was a divided highway, so I said, ‘Do a wheelie across.’” The driver bounced across the median, skidded around, and headed back for the gate. The Iraqis and the bus had to go on to the next interchange to reverse direction because they couldn’t navigate the median.

  Kay and his driver beat the crowd by ten minutes. They were about to attempt the first zero-notice inspection in IAEA history. “As soon as we hopped out,” he told me, “I walked up to the Iraqi guard—this was a little dinky base for training truck drivers—and demanded access. The base commander turned up then, a colonel, and I got on my best high horse: ‘On behalf of the United Nations Security Council,’ the pope, and anyone else I could think of, ‘I have a resolution, we demand access.’ It was standard procedure as soon as we got anyplace for my driver to set up the telephone satellite dish even if we didn’t need it. It was a big antenna back then, a big fanned-open suitcase. Imposing. You could act as if you had capability even if you didn’t. I told the Iraqi colonel I was going to call New York, call the Security Council. He said, ‘I can’t give you access to this base without permission from Baghdad. There’s nothing on this base.’ I said, ‘That’s for me to determine.’ Then he made a fatal mistake—literally, because subsequently Saddam had him executed for it. He said, ‘I can’t give you access to this base, but you can put people up there’—he pointed to a water tower inside the fence line—‘and you can inspect from there until we sort this business out.’” By then the bus had arrived with its crowd of inspectors; Kay realized he’d be able to search and film from the water tower and jumped at the chance. “I said immediately, ‘That’s what we need. Let’s get on top of that and look.’ So three guys went up there with cameras.”

  What they photographed was astonishing. “It literally looked like dinosaurs in heat,” Kay said, laughing. Sixty-foot tank transporters—big forward-cab military trucks with flatbed trailers for hauling tanks—fifty or more in a long line, were starting up and roaring out the base’s back exit loaded with big iron Frisbees and tarp-covered crates. “I immediately had a couple of guys take a Land Rover and go around the base and try to get more film. They chased the trucks down the road, snapping away.” The truck guards started firing into the air to scare them off. When they turned back and rejoined the others at the base, they had hundreds of frames of evidence that the Iraqis had been building calutrons to enrich uranium. Kay reported immediately to the U.N., and in New York that evening the president of the Security Council deplored Iraq’s denial of access to the site and requested that the secretary-general send a high-level mission to Baghdad. “The David Kay cowboys9 really cut loose,” Gallucci said later. “They were following the calutron trail. That put the inspection team on the map.… It caught the Iraqis in a huge lie, which was very useful for public support, and which made it clear to everybody that this was a game of hiding and finding.”

  The delegation the U.N. sent out consisted of Hans Blix, Rolf Ekéus, Mohamed ElBaradei, and the U.N. under secretary-general for disarmament affairs, Yasushi Akashi, with Ekéus in charge. (To finesse any conflicts with Blix, Ekéus asked for and got written confirmation of his authority from U.N. secretary-general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar—the two Swedes, from different Swedish political parties, often disagreed.) They departed New York immediately and arrived in Baghdad around noon on 30 June. During the next three days they met with Iraqi officials up to and including Hussein Kamel and Tariq Aziz, debates that generated more heat than light. Blix eventually conducted a long inspection at Fallujah, but the site had been scrubbed. Worse, wrote an Ekéus senior adviser, “Rolf Ekéus felt that10 both Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei had been too quick and too willing to accept Iraqi protestations that there had never been a nuclear weapons program and that the inspectors under David Kay must have been mistaken if they thought they had seen calutron components on the trucks leaving Fallujah.”

  The special delegation left Iraq on 3 July 1991—David Kay and his inspectors left then as well—and reported to the Security Council the next day. In the meantime, in the wake of the warning shots at Fallujah, George H. W. Bush had implicitly threatened military action against Iraq if it continued to resist cooperating with the inspections. “We can’t allow this brutal bully to go back on this solemn agreement and to threaten people that are there under U.N. jurisdiction,” Bush told the media. He put eighteen ships of the U.S. Central Command on alert in the Persian Gulf. Its two carriers supported 155 aircraft; seven other ships in the fleet loaded Tomahawk cruise missiles.11

  The message got through. Abruptly, just as the third IAEA inspection group under Dimitri Perricos was heading to Baghdad on 6 July 1991, Saddam Hussein authorized full disclosure of the Iraqi uranium-enrichment program. In early May the Iraqi dictator had formed a Concealment Operations Committee headed by his son Qusay. It was Qusay’s Special Republican Guard which had been playing hide-and-seek with the U.N. teams, moving equipment around, burying it in the desert, scrubbing former production sites. Recognizing now that U.S. satellite collections made further concealment impossible, wrote the senior inspector Scott Ritter, Saddam directed “all concealment task forces12 … to initiate emergency procedures for the identification of critical components and material that would continue to be hidden.… The unilateral destruction of the remaining material was also decided.” As a result of this decision, Iraq would destroy most of its WMD program materials and production equipment across the summer of 1991, without recording what it destroyed. The absence of such evidence, which made it impossible to prove that the destruction had taken place, would fatally compromise Iraq’s future security.

  “The inspectors arrived13 in Baghdad,” Perricos recalled, “and on the next morning”—7 July 1991—“they were delivered a big list of items that Iraq now wanted to declare. There was a long list of facilities, but—more important than anything else—there were the names of the places where the inspectors could find all these calutrons from the EMIS program. We went to one of these locations, and the first thing that we requested was ‘roll the trucks in.’ And the trucks arrived, and the inspectors were happy.”

  Perricos’s action team spent the next week and a half working to verify the Iraqi government’s declarations. The EMIS program was the furthest along of Iraq’s nuclear research-and-development efforts, but as with the U.S. Manhattan Project, it had not been the only line of attack. “At one time or another,”14 the IAEA team reported to the Security Council, “gaseous diffusion, electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS), gas centrifuge and chemical exchange technologies were examined by Iraq. The commitment to EMIS for production-scale development and deployment followed early successes with the method and, most importantly, the demonstration that the separator units and magnets could be made in Iraq.”

  Another reason the Iraqis chose EMIS as their primary technology for enriching uranium was revealed to Perricos’s team at a seminar with the Iraqi technical staff, Perricos said, “where the inspectors asked15 questions about the enrichment program. [At one point] the Iraqis in the front of the room could not provide any answers. Finally, from the back of the room, a voice says, ‘Well, I will explain that.’ That was the first time we saw Dr. Jaffar.” Jaffar Dhia Jaffar,
handsome even behind his de rigueur Saddam mustache, was a British-educated high-energy physicist who turned out to be the head of the Iraqi program. His grandfather had been a comrade-in-arms of T. E. Lawrence, his father an adviser to King Faisal II until the king’s assassination in 1958, but the Jaffars were Shiite, and rather than remain in Iraq under its radical new Sunni leadership, Jaffar’s father had chosen comfortable exile with his family in England. Jaffar graduated from the University of Birmingham in 1968 and then trained at Manchester. He worked for a time at Harwell, the British Los Alamos, though not on nuclear weapons. In 1975, when he was thirty-three, he was passed over for a professorship at Imperial College, London, where he had taught since 1969, and decided to return to Iraq. There, then–vice president Saddam Hussein recruited him for the Iraqi nuclear program. By 1979 he was vice chairman of the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission.

  Jaffar has maintained, and most official accounts report, that the Iraqi atomic-bomb program only turned to an enriched-uranium approach to bomb development after the Israelis destroyed the Osirak reactor in 1981. There is evidence, however, that Jaffar was researching electromagnetic-isotope separation before he returned to Iraq, and even stronger evidence that he was doing so on his country’s behalf by 1979.

  For a brief time in the late 1960s, Jaffar worked at the Iraqi Nuclear Research Center in Baghdad. He published twelve scientific papers between 1967 and 1976, a productive period in his life. Some of the papers were researched at Birmingham, others at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, located on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, where he worked in the early 1970s. When Jaffar returned to Iraq in 1975, one of his colleagues16 reported, he took with him the entire CERN library of computerized magnet-design programs.17 Several were standard American programs that CERN had used to design its own magnets.