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Most experts, including the CIA, say that while Saddam may lust for a bomb, he hasn't got one yet. But he has demonstrated a continued interest in acquiring one. Iraq still has the technical capacity: military officials point to Saddam's continued employment of 200 nuclear Ph.D.s and 7,000 ancillary workers at a secret location near Baghdad, who, the Americans say, perfect bomb designs through low-level R. and D. Inspectors were not able to destroy all of Iraq's nuclear-manufacturing equipment, and U.N. experts say Saddam has been able since 1998 to smuggle in material to replace much of what was lost.
But Saddam is still thought to lack the essential ingredient: fissile material to spark nuclear combustion. Before the Gulf War, Saddam paid German scientists to help assemble hundreds of gas centrifuges to cook bomb-grade enriched uranium from tons of raw ore. The Germans are gone now, and so are nearly all those centrifuges, although both the Atomic Energy Agency and U.S. intelligence say Iraq probably managed to squirrel away a dozen. But even if the Iraqis could put those centrifuges back together without foreign help and operate them around the clock, in five years they still could not distill enough highly enriched uranium to make one bomb. Saddam could make one faster by stealing or buying enriched uranium on the black market from former Soviet republics--which U.S. intelligence believes he has not yet succeeded in doing. If he could make such a deal, however, U.S. officials say Iraq could have a crude nuclear weapon in months, with a yield equivalent to the ones that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
SO HOW DANGEROUS IS HE?
Despite Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's constant tease that the Administration will soon flash hot new information, there appears to be nothing in U.S. intelligence reports showing that Iraq has made so great a leap forward in its dangerous arsenal as to require an immediate invasion. As the National Security Council sifts through what it can publish to persuade the public, its chief, Condoleezza Rice, is advising her colleagues that "there's no smoking gun."
In lieu of that, the let's-roll camp emphasizes--as one Administration official put it--"what we do have that's new adds to the whole narrative of the story." The hawks mean that to assess the risk properly, Saddam's weapons potential must be laid alongside the dictator's well-known nasty past. The way they see it, Saddam already has all the weapons of mass destruction he needs to pose an intolerable threat--because he would use them, personally or by terrorist proxy. They point out that he used chemicals against Iran during his eight-year war with his neighbor, and he gassed 50,000 to 100,000 rebellious Kurds inside his own country. Saddam may be contained "in his box" for now, but he is not likely to stay there: deterrence, which kept the cold war cold, simply won't work with someone this "evil."