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13 September 2002

Official Says Iraq Lacks Only Fissile Material for Nuclear Weapons

(Defense Department Report, September 13) (460)
A senior Defense Department official says Iraq could produce a nuclear
weapon within a year if the Iraqis acquire fissile material and decide
"that's what they're going to do with it."
The official told reporters at the Pentagon September 13 that Iraq has
not lost any of its technical expertise or documentation since the
Persian Gulf war more than a decade ago. If the Iraqis acquire the
requisite material tomorrow then, he said, "it's a question of .just
how quickly" they can fabricate and assemble nuclear weapons. "We're
measuring, probably, in the order of less than a year to put these
kind of things together," he added.
The official said that the Iraqis recently tested ballistic missile
components, and flight-tested ballistic missiles that exceed the
150-kilometer range to which they are limited by UN Security Council
Resolution 687.
While that resolution addressed the issue of a missile's range, he
noted, it did not address the issue of missile payload. He went on to
explain that "you can take a very powerful rocket, load it down with a
lot of weight, and it will only go 150 kilometers. But, if you take
the weight off, it will fly a lot farther. And so the suspicion is
that that's exactly what the Iraqis are up to."
He expressed the view that Iraq has retained the infrastructure and
expertise needed to develop and produce systems with ranges in excess
of 150 kilometers and that "with outside assistance" the Iraqis "could
fly a domestically developed medium-range ballistic missile.out to
1,500 kilometers by the middle of the decade."
The official, who declined to be identified by name, made his comments
as part of an unclassified briefing about the connections between
states that sponsor terrorism and terrorist networks that seek weapons
of mass destruction. Secret and top secret versions of the briefing
were provided earlier to members of NATO, former secretaries of
defense, and select members of Congress.
A day before the media briefing, the White House released a background
report on Iraq which said the Iraqis had tried to buy, in the past 14
months, thousands of aluminum tubes which could be used as components
of centrifuges to enrich the uranium needed to produce nuclear
weapons.
The White House report also said Iraq "continues its attempts to
procure mobile biological weapons (BW) laboratories that could be used
for further research and development." The senior defense official
said UN weapons inspectors knew "Iraq was pursuing mobile
fermentation, but the inspections never found them."
As background to his presentation he showed a slide, as an example, of
how a mobile BW lab could be concealed inside tractor-trailer trucks.
A BW lab requires very little space and could be set up within a small
room, he said. A small number of trucks would be "sufficient to have a
capability for producing biological weapons agents," he added.
(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S.
Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)