From outside the Abu Gharib barracks near Baghdad, inspectors for the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency could see what one member called "frenzied activity": trucks, cranes and forklifts moving out heavy, draped objects. But Iraqi soldiers would not let them in until three days later. By then, said Hans Blix, head of the IAEA, there was "no longer any trace of the activities and objects" his people had seen before.
But there is not much doubt about what the Iraqis were doing. They were playing an exasperating, and dangerous, shell game with calutrons, which are World War II-era devices to enrich...