28 July 1998
IAEA SAYS IRAQ STILL HAS THE ABILITY TO BUILD NUCLEAR WEAPONS
(The Int'l Atomic Energy Agency reports to the UNSC) (720) By Judy Aita USIA United Nations Correspondent United Nations -- The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) once again warned the UN Security Council July 27 that while it has no evidence that Iraq has any nuclear weapons materials, the international community should assume that Iraq has kept documents, "specimens of important components," and has a cadre of experts which could re-start its program if monitoring slackens. In a report to the Security Council, IAEA said that it has not found any evidence that Iraq has officially abandoned its secret nuclear program. The report was requested by the United States and others after some Council members wanted to acknowledge Iraq's progress and have IAEA stop intrusive inspections. The IAEA is responsible for overseeing the destruction of Iraq's nuclear weapons capabilities while the Special Commission (UNSCOM) in Iraq concentrates on Iraq's other programs that have been banned as part of the Persian Gulf War cease-fire agreement. The Security Council will not lift wide-ranging economic sanctions against Baghdad until it is certain that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction or ability to reacquire them. IAEA Director General Mohamed Elbaradei said in the written report that during talks with Iraqi officials in June and July Iraq said it "had been unsuccessful in its endeavors to locate verifiable documentation of the abandonment of the clandestine nuclear program. (Iraq) reiterated its contention that since no government decree had been issued to establish the program, no complementary decree had been required to record its abandonment." The IAEA pointed out that Iraq had made significant progress in weaponization technologies before the Gulf War. "It is also clear there remains in Iraq a considerable intellectual resource in the form of a cadre of well-educated, highly experienced personnel who were employed in Iraq's clandestine nuclear program," Elbaradei said. IAEA said it had to assume "Iraq has the knowledge and the technical capability to exploit, for nuclear weapons purposes, any relevant materials or technology to which it may gain access in the future." IAEA said it "cannot...provide absolute assurance of the absence of readily concealable items, such as components of centrifuge machines or copies of weapon-related documentation." And IAEA monitoring "cannot guarantee detection of readily concealable or disguiseable proscribed activities such as computer-based weaponization studies or small-scale centrifuge cascade development," the report said. "It should be recognized that Iraq's direct acquisition of weapon-usable nuclear material would present a severe technical challenge of ongoing monitoring and verification measures and great reliance must be placed on international controls," it said. "Effective ongoing monitoring and verification in Iraq...must be comprehensive and rigorous and, as a result, is intrusive," the IAEA director said in the report. The IAEA report talked about the "laborious process" of getting information from Iraqi officials on their nuclear weapons program. Characterizing Iraq's cooperation as a "minimalistic approach," the report said that "it is clear that Iraq initially pursued a strategy of concealment" until high level talks in 1993 and then two years later the 1995 defection of the late General Hussein Kamel who was in charge of Iraqi's military weapons programs. Nevertheless, the report said, "the provision of information by Iraq has seldom, if ever, been voluntary and Iraq's cooperation in this regard has never approached full transparency." Nonetheless, the IAEA says it has been able to assembly "a technically coherent picture of Iraq's clandestine nuclear program" and has destroyed or rendered harmless the known components of that program. However, IAEA warned that "there is an inherent uncertainty in the completeness of that picture" compounded by Iraq's reluctance to supply information, questions about offers of assistance from an alleged unidentified foreign source, and missing drawings, documents and experimental test data. The report was similar to other IAEA reports to the Council in that it stated that "there are no indications of Iraq having retained any physical capability for the indigenous production of weapon-usable nuclear material in amounts of any practical significance." Although Iraq was at or close to producing highly enriched uranium, "there is no indication that Iraq has produced more than a few grams of weapons-usable nuclear material nor any indication that Iraq has otherwise acquired such material," the IAEA said.
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