The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  In 1979 Jaffar sent one of his engineers to CERN to learn about a large magnet that was nearing completion for use in a high-resolution spectrometer the organization was building. The CERN magnet, like the disk-shaped magnets built later for the Iraqi calutron program, had hexagonal symmetry, although it differed from the Iraqi magnets in being toroidal—doughnut-shaped, with a large hole in the middle to allow a particle beam to pass through. A Swiss physicist, André Gsponer, who was working on the CERN experiment at the time, learned from a colleague about the Iraqi engineer’s visit and realized later, when the Iraqi calutrons were discovered by the IAEA inspection teams, that Jaffar had drawn on the CERN technology in designing his calutron magnets. The Iraqi physicist ultimately settled for an alternative design with a solid iron core,18 but it retained some of the superior features of the CERN design. The Stanford University theoretical physicist Sidney Drell was one of the several dozen scientists who participated in the development of the big mass spectrometer at CERN. “If that was the model19 for the Iraqi calutron magnets,” he told me, “that was way beyond the Manhattan Project calutrons.” Based on the technical questions the Iraqi engineer asked, Gsponer concluded that “it was quite possible20 that Iraq, at the time, was already comparing the engineering problems of various options for the construction of an industrial-scale EMIS plant.”

  Jaffar later revealed the strategic thinking behind Saddam Hussein’s summer 1991 decision to destroy most of his WMD infrastructure. “There was no sense21 in developing a nuclear-weapons program against the United States,” the Iraqi scientist told the BBC in 2004. “That was why the program was stopped in July 1991, hoping that the sanctions would be lifted soon. Because it was far more important to lift sanctions than to continue with these programs. The strategic aim of these programs22 became more or less useless when the United States and Great Britain became involved.” Saddam had pursued nuclear and other terror weapons since the early 1970s for a deterrent against Iran and Israel and to further his goal of becoming the unchallenged leader of the Arab Middle East. Giving up his nuclear and other WMD programs acknowledged the reality of U.S. and British military and nuclear dominance.

  What Saddam was not prepared to admit even then, Perricos noted later, was the nuclear program’s real purpose: to make nuclear weapons:

  Jaffar tried to explain23—in his own way—what the EMIS program was all about. As he said, the program, of course, was a peaceful program; it had nothing to do with any intention to weaponize. Iraq had to supply the fuel for its own power reactor and research reactor projects. But in a subsequent visit to Tarmiya, they gave us a video that for the first time enabled us to assess the magnitude of the project that was being built in the large halls at Tarmiya.

  The video showed the big magnets as they had been set up in place. You could see the various pumps and vacuum systems. There were supposed to be a large number of them; they followed exactly the classical recipe learned from the Manhattan Project. They used a large number of calutrons in the beginning of the process to enrich the feed material to a low level with high efficiency. Then they had set up the second part in another building where there were a smaller number of calutrons to enrich this low-enriched material to 93 percent uranium 235.

  “Near the end of our stay24 in Iraq on that inspection,” Jere Nichols said, “our minders took us in a bus to a desert site called Resala. Here for our benefit the Iraqis dug up four EMIS magnet pieces—a coil and three pole pieces—that had outside diameters of about four meters. These, most likely, were among those spirited away from Fallujah by truck on June 28.” It was brutally hot at the desert site, Perricos remembered. “The place that they took us had a lot of buried equipment that was related to the EMIS project. We found calutrons and parts of the large vacuum chambers, destroyed vacuum pumps, and parts of coils that had been used to magnetize the huge iron cores. People could fry their eggs or heat their MREs on the jeep windows.”

  The unearthing of the calutrons prompted a visit from Hans Blix, who flew in from New York to inspect. “When Blix suddenly realized25 that the Iraqis had lied to him,” one of the inspectors recalled, “he looked thunderstruck. It was absolutely a new concept to him that a nation-state would lie to a U.N. official. He had a religious experience.” Blix, nobody’s fool, was probably responding to the sheer magnitude of the deception, not merely the fact of it, but it’s certainly true that his experiences with Iraq affected his view of the kind of inspections the IAEA would need to conduct thereafter. “The revelation that Iraq26 had secretly enriched uranium without being detected shook the world,” Blix wrote. “In the board of the IAEA there was agreement with my conclusion that a sharpening of the safeguards system was necessary. It also now became politically possible, which it had hardly been earlier.” At the U.N. Security Council in mid-July, Blix added, “the Soviet ambassador,27 Yuli Vorontsov, asked me whether it was certain that the Iraqi enrichment program was not peaceful. I replied that it was not plausible that a developing country would devote a billion dollars to enriching uranium for power reactors when there was an ample supply of cheap enriched uranium in the world markets and when, in any case, it had constructed no such reactors.”

  Through the summer of 1991 the Iraqis cooperated, at least so far as their EMIS and centrifuge programs were concerned. They gave the inspectors seminars and guided them to the desert sites where equipment was buried. “We traveled all around Iraq28 going to disposal sites,” Frank Pabian, a senior analyst at Los Alamos, recalled. “These had been intended for concealment and deception, to hide the extent of their program. They took any materials related to enrichment out into the desert and buried them. There were a number of sites near Lake Tharthar”—seventy-five miles north of Baghdad—“and there were other sites around the country. We basically dug up tons of stainless-steel valves, some new and still in plastic, in crates buried underground. The Iraqis would take us out into the desert and they’d say, ‘Well, it’s out here somewhere,’ and we’d say, ‘Well, where?’ They’d say, ‘Kind of in that area.’ They could drive you to the general area and then they’d work off of fence posts—‘I think it’s the third fence post.’” John Phillips, another Los Alamos recruit to the inspector ranks, told a laboratory newsletter of finding “a sand-covered Los Alamos report on nuclear technology that the wind had scattered from a concealment site.”29 The work could be dangerous. “Much of the equipment had been buried or blown up,” the newsletter paraphrased Phillips, “and the disposal sites were littered with Soviet TNT, primers and detonators.” When the Iraqis started digging, Phillips recalled, “we would back up a respectful distance.”

  The primary site where the Iraqis had been pursuing electromagnetic-isotope separation proved to be one that had been unknown to the IAEA prior to the war: Tarmiya, the site that the pilot returning from Baghdad with his bomb load during the war had inadvertently struck and that B-52s had then all but excavated. Of the truckloads of Frisbees and calutron parts that David Kay’s inspectors had chased down the road and photographed at Fallujah, Kay and Jay Davis wrote, “most of the material30 … was from Tarmiya, where 8 first-stage [calutron] separators were in operation at the time of the bombing and 17 in assembly.… The process bay in building 33 at Tarmiya was designed to hold seventy [primary-stage] separators. Initial installation had begun in January 1990, at the rate of approximately one separator per month, and the 8 in operation when the war began were at various points of development.” With a full complement of ninety primary and secondary calutrons, Tarmiya could have produced enough HEU for one or two bombs31 per year.

  But that was not all. Iraq had hired a Yugoslavian construction company to build the vast Tarmiya complex. In the mid-1980s Iraq had then taken the construction plans and used them to secretly duplicate Tarmiya at Ash Sharqat, a remote desert site 160 miles northeast of Baghdad. The Ash Sharqat EMIS installation, had it been completed, would have doubled Iraq’s capacity to produce HEU, to as much as one hundred kilograms per year—five t
o eight bombs’ worth, depending on design. It would also have served as a backup facility in case Israel or some other belligerent bombed Tarmiya. When Tarmiya was spotted and bombed during the Persian Gulf War, however, its duplicate at Ash Sharqat was also recognized because of its identical buildings (despite their different layout) and bombed to destruction by B-52s.

  Blix reported the EMIS discoveries to the IAEA Board of Governors on 17 July. “The facility at Tarmiya,”32 he told the board, “which was first described to our inspectors as a factory for the production of transformers, was, as the inspectors had concluded, a facility for the production of enriched uranium through the EMI separation method. It has been learnt that this huge facility was designed to house 90 electromagnetic isotope separators and that eight such separators were actually placed in operation in September 1990, resulting in the production of around half a kilogram of 4% enriched uranium.” Blix used the occasion to lobby the board diplomatically to stiffen its spine:

  It is now being asked,33 and we must ask ourselves, whether major changes are needed to strengthen the safeguards system. The case of Iraq demonstrates the inspection challenges that may need to be met and the ability of the Agency to meet them. This ability was appreciated by members of the Security Council at the meeting on 15 July. May I conclude that the lesson to be learnt from the present case is that a high degree of assurance can be obtained that the Agency can uncover clandestine nuclear activities if three major conditions are fulfilled.

  First, that access is provided to information obtained inter alia through national technical means regarding sites that may require inspection;

  Second, that access to any such sites, even at short notice, is an unequivocal right of the Agency;

  Third, that access to the Security Council is available for backing and support that may be necessary to perform the inspection.

  Iraq was the first nation caught attempting to develop nuclear weapons under cover of its commitment to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; changing the rules to interdict further such breakouts was clearly a necessity.

  A third inspection team arrived in Baghdad on 18 July to replace the breakthrough group, a fourth on 27 July that continued documenting, destroying, or applying seals to indicate if equipment was being used. But something was missing, Gallucci knew. “What we didn’t have34 was a clear statement from the Iraqis that they did, in fact, have a nuclear-weapons program. We all thought that this was pretty obvious. They had all these programs to enrich uranium; they had been working on plutonium chemistry. Come on! ‘Well, no, that is not the case,’ said the Iraqis. The Iraqis, as they described it, were just really interested in the advanced nuclear fuel cycle, and they still maintained that there was no interest in nuclear weapons. So we still had not nailed it down. We had tried everything. We had a lot of folks come and present our views at the United Nations, but the case, we were told, was not proved when we went into August of 1991.”

  “SOMETIME DURING THAT AUGUST,”35 Gallucci then recalled, “I was approached by someone in our intelligence community, who told me that they had extraordinary information on the location of documents that were quite relevant and directly related to the nuclear-weapons program of Iraq. We could finally make the case if we could get in, do the inspections, get the documents, and get out—or, as he put it, at least get the documents out. That was a degree of precision I didn’t really appreciate until somewhat later.”

  Gallucci encountered resistance from Blix about conducting a document inspection. He talked to Ekéus and then tracked down David Kay at a conference at Los Alamos where the results of the first inspections were being reviewed. “Bob said, ‘Let’s walk the fence,’” Kay recalled. “We went outside and walked and he said, ‘We’ve got confirmation of the location of the documents and we’re going to carry out an inspection of it.’ I’d come back from Iraq frustrated about the disagreements between Blix and Ekéus. I told Zifferero that unless we sorted it out I wasn’t going to do any more inspections. So I said to Bob, ‘What does “we” mean?’ He said, ‘Well, UNSCOM’s going to do it.’ I said, ‘Bob, that’s a mistake. If they’re nuke documents, then it ought to be the IAEA.’ ‘Well, Ekéus talked to Blix and Blix won’t let you lead it. Blix doesn’t want to conduct the inspection at all.’ I said, ‘No, that’s wrong. It’s got to be an IAEA-led inspection.’ And Bob said, ‘Well, Ekéus said the only way he’ll let the IAEA do it is if you lead it.’ I told him, ‘Wait until I get back to Vienna.’”

  Kay returned to Geneva and confronted Blix, who said he was uncomfortable about raiding government documents. “It just went against his Swedish36 sensitivity,” Kay said he thought. “He didn’t like to accuse government people of cheating or lying. He didn’t like the idea of purloining documents and all that. This went on for about two days, with discussions between him and Ekéus and him and me. I said, ‘Look, it’s a nuke inspection. If you don’t lead it, UNSCOM will do it and UNSCOM will get more credit for it, not less credit.’ Finally he agreed.”

  Ironically, Kay then advised Gallucci that he needed a different team from the IAEA experts who handled technology inspections. “Inevitably, the different team was drawn heavily from the intelligence agencies,” Kay told me. “It was way too senior. Everyone in the CIA wanted to get in on it. Some of them had last done things like this in Vietnam, and they were out of shape. I brought two inspectors from the IAEA, only two, because Blix really didn’t want the IAEA mixed up in raiding documents. And that was all right, because we weren’t going to do a lot of technical analysis. We were breaking into buildings and photographing documents.”

  Gallucci rounded up thirty-nine team members from what he calls “elsewhere,” a group that included American and British nuclear-weapon designers as well as private security specialists who were former military:

  The team was very, very special. I remember sitting in the back of an SUV with an Iraqi minder in the front. He looked at the fellow who was driving the vehicle, who was one of our “special people” and he said to me: “He does not look like a physicist.” And I said: “It’s just because he has a really thick neck. Is that what you’re thinking?” And he said: “Yes, that … and the crew cut. Where did you get him?” I answered: “Well, there was an ad in the New York Times.”

  We had a lot of team members with special skills, especially people who knew how to search buildings. Nothing in my training as a civil servant had taught me how to search a building properly, but we learned. We had a lot of special stuff, which was very useful for us, as it turned out.

  The team first assembled at the British Cabinet Office in London, of all places, for a briefing and a first lecture on how to search for documents. From there the group flew to Bahrain and practiced searching the airport buildings from which the British had staged during the war. “We took people through and taught them how you systematically search a room for documents,” Kay said. “You don’t go straight for the desk; you start at the perimeter and work inward. And sure enough, we found a top-secret British document, which the Brits did not appreciate.”

  Kay, Gallucci, and their team flew from Bahrain into Baghdad on Sunday morning, 22 September 1991. They had intelligence on two sites they meant to inspect: the Design Center, an international conference area with multiple buildings located diagonally across from the Al-Rashid Hotel, just outside what would become the Green Zone; and an administrative facility, Petrochemical-3 Center, in a building across from the Palestine Hotel in the city center. They planned to inspect the Design Center first. “We had a description of the insides of the building,” Kay told me, “and the location of all of the documents. Useful information like don’t get on the elevator, not even the Iraqis use the elevator.”

  Concerned about leaks, Kay posted a team outside the Design Center at two a.m. on the morning of 23 September, the day of the inspections,37 to prevent the Iraqis from carting away any evidence. “The Iraqis, of course, rolled up and found them and were very upset.” The full squad of i
nspectors arrived just before six a.m. and poured into the designated building without Iraqi resistance. “We had good luck and we had bad luck,” Kay recalled. “The facility clearly had been sanitized partially before. Documents were in huge disarray—someone had gone through them.” That was the bad luck. The inspectors worked for the next four hours searching through the building. Then, just after ten, they struck gold. “The good luck was, the basement of the building was L-shaped, with a very small room at the foot of the L. The people who had cleared documents must not have been the people who had put the documents there, because the people who had stored the documents had put the most valuable ones in this little back part of the L, a little room with a door. We opened the door and it was untouched. Everything was there.”

  Four boxes of documents awaited inspection. Kay had only a few Arabic linguists. “You usually have to triage. If you’re looking at scientific documents, they usually include schematics, so you don’t have to read everything. You do a quick triage. You try to seize or photograph as many as you can, but you really do have to reduce the volume. But when we hit this room, almost the first document we found when we opened the first case was a six-month interim report on the progress of the nuclear-weapons program.” The report was in Arabic, but it included calculations and drawings of the levitated-core implosion-bomb design that the Iraqis had been developing. It was titled “Al-Atheer Plant Progress Report38 for the Period 1 January 1990 to 31 May 1990.” The next several lines their translator read out made their hearts pound: