American officials were not alone last week in expressing doubts that Iraq could have produced materials for nuclear weapons within months of activating the 70-MW Tammuz reactor. That crucial Israeli contention did get some support, but also a lot more detailed criticism, from an impressive array of international nuclear scientists and Western government officials.
In Vienna, International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Sigvard Eklund, whose agency was responsible for monitoring the installation, declared that IAEA’s inspections made it all but impossible for Iraqi technicians to carry out secret activities. Eklund asserted that any such effort “would be detected with very high probability” by IAEA inspectors or French technicians on the site.
Eklund’s view that IAEA inspectors could discover nuclear chicanery was disputed in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by Roger Richter, an American married to an Israeli, who resigned last week as an inspector for the international agency. Richter, who had been assigned to cover the area including Iraq but had never personally inspected the Tammuz reactor, said that the Iraqis could have concealed bombmaking efforts during IAEA inspection visits. Richter also said he believed the Iraqis wanted to make bombs within five years,
Richter’s statement contradicted Eklund, but failed to explain how the Iraqis could fool the French technicians constantly on the scene. Last week the French government disclosed a secret agreement with Iraq for keeping French personnel at the reactor site until 1989. Michel Pecqueur, head of the French Atomic Energy Commission, insisted that the continued French presence would make it “impossible” for Iraq to stockpile the material to manufacture atomic weapons. If the Iraqis did try to cheat, he said, France would have cut off further supplies of enriched uranium. Pecqueur granted that a “significant quantity” of plutonium could be obtained by irradiating uranium in the reactor, then extracting it in the Italian-built “hot cell,” a laboratory designed for handling radioactive materials. But he maintained that the process, difficult for Iraqi technicians, would be easy to detect, especially since sealed, French-installed cameras would be monitoring the complex.
In the face of these claims, Israeli officials still adamantly asserted that Iraq had planned to build bombs. The main evidence: Baghdad’s insistence on being supplied with weapons-grade uranium and the existence of the Italian hot-cell lab capable of extracting plutonium. But Umberto Colombo, chairman of the Italian Nuclear Energy Commission, said last week that producing plutonium in tangible amounts would require extra equipment and technology. Said he: “It is absolutely impossible for these facilities we are supplying to be used to make plutonium for bombs.”
Technically, there is little doubt among experts that the Tammuz reactor, with modifications, could have produced bomb-grade plutonium. But the burden of proof that Iraq planned to do so still rested squarely on the Israelis.
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