Saddam was close to buying nuclear package: document

Washington: As troops massed on his border near the start of the Gulf War, Iraqi President Saddam Hussain weighed the purchase of a $150 million (Dh550.85 million) nuclear "package" deal that included not only weapons designs but also production plants and foreign experts to supervise the building of a nuclear bomb, according to documents uncovered by a former UN weapons inspector.

The offer, made in 1990 by an agent linked to Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, guaranteed Iraq a weapons-assembly line capable of producing nuclear warheads in as little as three years.

But Iraq lost the chance to capitalise when, months later, a multinational force crushed the Iraqi army and forced Saddam to abandon his nuclear ambitions, according to nuclear weapons expert David Albright, who describes the proposed deal in a new book.

Iraqi officials at the time appear to have taken the offer seriously and asked the Pakistanis for sample drawings as proof of their ability to deliver, the documents show. "With the assurance of [Iraqi intelligence agency] Mukhabarat ... the offer is not a sting operation," an Iraqi official scrawls in ink in the margin of one of the papers.

Khan's alleged interest in selling nuclear secrets to Saddam has been reported in numerous articles. An internal Mukhabarat memo that surfaced in the late 1990s discussed a secret proposal by one of Khan's agents to sell a nuclear weapons design for an advance payment of $5 million.

Nuclear assistance

But the newly uncovered documents suggest that Khan's offer of nuclear assistance was more comprehensive than previously known. A 1990 letter attributed to a Khan business associate offered Iraq a chance to leap past technical hurdles to acquire weapons capability.

"Pakistan had to spend a period of 10 years and an amount of $300 million to get it," begins one of the memos. "Now, with the practical experience and worldwide contacts Pakistan has developed, you could have AB in about three years' time and by spending about $150 million." "AB" was understood to mean "atomic bomb", Albright wrote in Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America's Enemies, released this week.

At the time of the 1990 offer, Iraq was embarked in a crash programme to develop nuclear weapons in the face of a threatened US-led attack over its occupation of Kuwait. By that date, Iraqi scientists had acquired a limited amount of weapons-grade enriched uranium but lacked several key components, including a workable design for a small nuclear warhead.

Fears that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons programme helped propel the US into a second war with Iraq in 2003, though a US review later determined Saddam was never able to mount a serious bid for the bomb after 1991.