Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency arrived in Baghdad
last week to inspect Iraq’s civilian nuclear facilities. The IAEA wants
to guarantee that 22 kilograms of weapons-grade uranium that was to be used
in research reactors has not been diverted for use in a nuclear weapon.
Two weeks ago, Iraq issued a special invitation to the agnecy to conduct
A decade ago, France sold Iraq 12.3 kilograms of uranium that was 93
per cent enriched, but in 1981, Israel bombed the research reactor where
it was to be used. Israel feared that Iraq would use the reactor to produce
plutonium. The uranium fuel is now in storage. The Soviet Union supplied
a further 10 kilograms of uranium that is 80 per cent enriched. The IAEA
inspected the uranium last in April.
Four countries, including Britain, have asked the IAEA to consider making
an additional surprise inspection of nuclear facilities in Iraq, according
to Nucleonics Week, an American trade magazine. This could include facilities
that have been off-limits to inspectors until now. Under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty of 1968, which Iraq has signed, the IAEA inspects civilian nuclear
facilities that member countries have declared subject to international
safeguards. The treaty allows ‘special’ inspections of undeclared facilities,
but the agency has never conducted one, says Spurgeon Keeny of the Arms
Control Association in Washington.
According to specialists on nuclear proliferation who met in Washington
last week, Iraq does not yet have the necessary materials to build nuclear
weapons. But Mark Hibbs of Nucleonics Week reports that German officials
believe Iraq obtained information from German companies on how to design
centrifuges for production of highly enriched uranium.
Centrifuges that spin at more than 3000 revolutions per second are used
to separate uranium-235, which can be used in bombs, from the more common
isotope U-238. A thousand of them would have to operate for more than a
year to produce enough highly-enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon.
Israel is becoming increasingly open about its own nuclear stockpile.
Before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Israeli officials seemed willing to discuss
the inclusion of these weapons in arms control talks with Arab nations,
says Geoffrey Kemp of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Officials
in Egypt and Jordan said that if Israel agreed to put its nuclear weapons
on the bargaining table, they would support negotiations covering chemical
weapons and missiles held by Arab countries.
With the region now on the brink of war, talk of arms control has given
way to a full-scale arms race. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other countries are
buying as many arms as they can afford, Kemp said in Washington last week.
In Israel, there is open speculation in the media about how the country’s
nuclear weapons might be used against Iraq, said Avner Cohen, of Tel Aviv
Some Israelis advocate a pre-emptive strike against Iraq’s nuclear facilities,
much like the air strike that destroyed Iraq’s research reactor at Osirak.
According to Cohen and Marvin Miller, a professor of nuclear engineering
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, destruction of Iraq’s nuclear
infrastructure will not remove the long-term dangers. ‘Even if the facilities
are destroyed, the incentive will remain, and we may soon confront the spectre
of a nuclear-armed renegade state,’ said Miller.
Non-proliferation policies should include all the countries in the region,
argues Miller. Israel’s nuclear arsenal must be restrained, and Iran, Iraq’s
traditional rival, is probably working on nuclear weapons as well, he said.
It is important to have international agreements to restrain nuclear programmes
‘and not just bomb Iraq’, says Miller.