Nuclear Weapons Iraq

A U.N. team of biological weapons experts Saturday renewed the search for Iraqi arms that may have gone undetected on earlier missions. Another nuclear inspection team left for Vienna after spending a week measuring material at an Iraqi facility near Baghdad. Officials said there were no reports of problems from either team despite demands that Baghdad allow U.N. helicopters to make surprise inspection flights. President Bush has threatened to send U.S. aircraft to protect the U.N.

The head of the new U.N. commission charged with ridding Iraq of any remaining weapons of mass destruction said Thursday that his agency plans surprise inspections throughout that country as part of its mandate. In outlining his plan for the commission, executive chairman Hans Blix stressed that the inspection agency will seek to be highly technical, nonpolitical and tightly controlled in its handling of intelligence information.

Iraq's foreign minister will meet Sunday with the Security Council president, apparently to deliver Baghdad's much-awaited reply to U.N. demands to stop interfering with the work of the world body's weapons-inspection teams. The Iraqis' move came Friday as the major powers indicated their patience was running out with Iraq's foot-dragging in response to the Security Council demand Monday for renewed promises that Baghdad will obey the cease-fire terms, including free passage for U.N.

For a year now, the big powers at the United Nations have been arguing about the best way to deal with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The U.S. and Britain essentially see him as a criminal on parole who ought to be punished when he breaks the terms of his probation, while Russia, France and China suggest he ought to be encouraged toward rehabilitation. The U.S. view has largely prevailed, with the U.N.

Iraq may still be three to five years away from producing a deliverable nuclear warhead, Israeli experts say, but it has already developed missiles that can reach targets throughout the Middle East. Iraq's President Saddam Hussein, they say, is embarked on a "very aggressive" nuclear weapons program. "Hussein is trying to acquire all kinds of technology transfer from abroad to develop Iraq's nuclear weapons capability," Dr.

Members of the U.N. Security Council, on the one-year anniversary of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, unveiled a plan Friday calling for an indefinite period of Draconian arms controls on the regime of Saddam Hussein. From missiles to microbes, chemical weapons to nuclear materials, Iraq's military establishment will be placed under a microscope, according to the extraordinarily detailed documents that include lists of materials Baghdad's government will be barred from producing.

U.N. experts are planning to seek to inspect possible sites where Iraqi President Saddam Hussein may have secreted nuclear materials that could be used to create atomic weapons, diplomats said Friday.

After decades of clandestine effort to develop nuclear weapons, a handful of nations with disturbing histories of aggressive behavior--the "undeterrables," as some have called them--are nearing technological payoff time, American analysts warn.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein declared Monday that his military machine has nerve gas and the means to deliver it, threatening to destroy "half of Israel" if it attacks Iraqi targets.

Iraq's Al Muthanna chemical weapons complex, strewn with decaying and leaking munitions amid the rubble from the Persian Gulf War, is, in the words of a United Nations inspector, "the most dangerous place in the world." Its hellish image was seared into the minds of the inspectors some weeks ago when an Iraqi bulldozer started to crush 122-millimeter chemical warfare rocket projectiles under their watchful gaze. The Iraqis had assured them that all the projectiles were empty.

The International Atomic Energy Agency is investigating whether a top Pakistani scientist offered Iraq plans for nuclear weapons. IAEA spokesman David Kyd on Monday confirmed a Newsweek magazine report that his agency is looking into a secret Iraqi memorandum naming Abdul Qadeer Khan as offering to sell designs for a nuclear bomb. Newsweek identified Qadeer Khan as Pakistan's top nuclear weapons scientist but said he had denied involvement.

For the first time since the U.N. began dismantling Iraq's weapons programs after the Persian Gulf War, the United States is prepared to recognize significant cooperation by Baghdad in reducing its illegal arsenal, U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson said Monday. "One has to acknowledge progress that has been made" in curbing Iraq's nuclear warfare capability and in Baghdad's adherence to an agreement with U.N.

President Clinton has ordered adoption of a revised U.S. policy statement on nuclear weapons that explicitly scraps the Cold War's central emphasis on the threat from the former Soviet Union while laying new stress on the danger posed by rogue states such as Iraq. After more than a half-year's study, Clinton has signed a new version of the "presidential decision directive" that instructs the secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff on how to target the military's nuclear weapons.

Iraq launched a crash effort in 1990 to produce a nuclear bomb for use against U.S.-led forces massing in the Persian Gulf after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, U.S. and U.N. officials disclosed Friday. The effort, which accelerated an existing nuclear weapons program, was aimed at producing a weapon for use by April, 1991. The project was a response to the massive buildup in the Gulf region by a U.S.-led coalition that took Baghdad by surprise, according to Pentagon sources.

A yearlong undercover investigation into the black market trade in nuclear materials from the former Soviet Union ended Thursday with the seizure of seven tons of zirconium sold to U.S. agents posing as arms buyers for Iraq. Five tons were seized in New York where three men, referred to by undercover agents as "the Greeks," were arrested and charged with export violations. One is the former president of a Manhattan bank. It was the largest confiscation of such materials in U.S. history.

Iraq said Saturday that it was postponing talks with the United Nations on future monitoring of its weapons program because Washington had reneged on an agreement to provide security for the Iraqi delegation. The talks on arms control and monitoring, set to open in New York on Tuesday, are part of an accord struck last month during a visit to Baghdad by Rolf Ekeus, head of the U.N. commission scrapping Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

A senior Iraqi nuclear scientist has defected to the United States and told Pentagon experts that a significant part of Saddam Hussein's nuclear research facilities survived U.S. bombing raids during the Persian Gulf War, officials said Monday. The defector, who reportedly drove up to a U.S. military checkpoint in northern Iraq last month and asked for asylum, is being debriefed by U.S.

The massive haul of secret documents carted out of Baghdad by U.N. inspectors provide definitive proof that Iraq was engaged in the manufacture of nuclear weapons, a Security Council source reported Wednesday. The source, obviously familiar with the material, at least in a general way, said the inspectors did not uncover any grand design for the manufacture of a nuclear bomb. But they did find plans for components indispensable for making such a weapon.

A U.N. envoy sent to defuse a standoff with Baghdad met with Iraq's foreign minister, and both sides agreed to continue the talks. Rolf Ekeus gave no details about his talks with Foreign Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf over Iraq's refusal to permit video cameras at two missile-test sites. The discussions lasted about two hours.

Iraq has surrendered to U.N. ultimatums time and again for more than two years, but the latest confrontation in Baghdad touches on the most sensitive and knotty issue of all: acceptance of inspections at its military installations forever.