Iraq Survey Group Final Report
Flow-Forming Machinery
ISG did not find evidence that flow-forming equipment was used to produce rotors for a reconstituted nuclear centrifuge program. As a result of IAEA inspections and Iraqi mishandling of equipment—in an effort to avoid potential military strikes—Iraq effectively lost its capability to conduct flow-forming operations of the type needed to support a centrifuge program.
- On 23 June 2003, an ISG team inspected the Umm Al Marik site. It was severely looted and vandalized. The team saw several of the machine mounts where the flow formers had been mounted prior to the war. The remains of one large flow former remained, stripped of all usable parts.
Beginning in 1989, Iraq was pursuing advanced flow-forming technologies and equipment from foreign sources. One company that provided considerable technical support and machinery to the Iraqi industrial base was the H&H Metalform Company of Germany. Iraq’s Engineering Design Center failed to develop a maraging steel centrifuge rotor due to manufacturing limitations, which helped precipitate the shift to trying to acquire a carbon fiber production capability.
- As of 1991, H&H Metalform had sold nine flow-forming machines to Iraq.
- In February 1993, a UN Inspection Team visited the Nassr Plant; they inventoried and recorded the serial numbers of eight Flowtronics, H&H flow-forming machines. Iraqi officials contend that these machines were used to produce 122-mm rockets and components (see Figures 12 and 13).
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