OSIRAK_bombing

Incorrect, incomplete or unreliable information
can lead to tragically incorrect decisions

Richard Wilson
Department of Physics
Harvard University

The Iraqi nuclear physics program can be said to have begun with the provision of a small research reactor (originally 2 MW upgraded to 4 MW) by the USSR in the 1960s. When oil money flowed after the oil price rise in the early 1970ss, ambitions increased and, with encouragement of much of the world, Iraq proposed to buy a larger, 50 MW research reactor. At that time it was realized that the 50 MW heavy water research reactors sold by Canada to India and by France to Israel were being used to produce plutonium for weapons. Although unlike these two countries Iraq had signed the Non Proliferation Treaty and had agreed to inspections of its declared facilities, there was considerable doubt about the intention of Saddam Hussein. Now that many Iraqis in the nuclear program have told us their stories, it is well to reexamine the program and see the extent to which NPT was adequate.

The book by an investigative journalist, Rodger Claire,⁽¹⁾ reviewed in your latest issue, tells the story from an Israeli point of view but should not be taken as definitive evidence that the OSIRAK reactor was a part of the program. An earlier book by Hamsa ⁽²⁾ gave an account that emphasizes Saddam's obvious desire in 1971 to build a nuclear infrastructure for ultimate bomb making. For this book he was suitable rewarded by Ahmad Chalabi and the US government by a position in the interim government. But Hamsa clearly did not understand reactors. On page 82 he talked about buying a copy of the OSIRIS reactor and on page 120 he talked about the OSIRAK reactor not realizing that they were very different. This is strange for a man who claims to have been in charge of plutonium production. Another book by Khaddouri⁽³⁾ also suggests that there was more myth than reality to Hamsa's ideas. Now there is a more authoritative book on the subject by Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar, originally a high energy and nuclear physicist, entitled "the Assignment" published by Spartacus in January 2005⁽⁴⁾. Unfortunately for most of us it is in Norwegian! The Arabic version of the book, which contains much more detail, has been published this week by The Centre for Arab Unity Studies (CAUS) in Beirut. No doubt conspiracy theorists will write volumes on why the English language version is so much delayed.

In 1979, Jafar's colleague, the nuclear chemist Husain Shahristani, was arrested on the charge of being a member of the outlawed al-Da'awa party and had brought from Paris secret instructions for them. Dr. Jafar Dhia Jafar objected to the incarceration of his colleague and was promptly put under house arrest. In September 1981, after OSIRAK was bombed, he was summoned by Saddam Huseein and agreed to work on the bomb and released. He became the scientific leader of the Iraqi nuclear program. Also, In the 1970s he had negotiated the technical aspects of the OSIRAK project with the French and initialed the formal contract. After the first Gulf war in 1991, Dr. Jafar was the chief technical liaison between the Iraqi regime and the IAEA, which, as we all now know, succeeded in shutting down Iraq's nuclear program well before 1999, but failed in clearly reporting this fact to the Security Council before the 2003 war.

In 1980 I shared the worries of the Israelis described by Claire and mentioned them, in person, to Dr Yuuval Neeman of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission⁽⁵⁾. But as I studied the matter I realized that I was wrong.⁽⁶⁾ The nuclear research reactor OSIRAK was NOT like the DIMONA reactor, which was a heavy water cooled reactor and a near copy of the French OSIRIS reactor but was a light water cooled reactor explicitly designed to be unsuited for making plutonium.⁽⁷⁾ This view was held by many authorities.⁽⁸⁾ ⁽⁹⁾ ⁽¹⁰⁾ Jafar had written a report on the subject which confirms this view^{⁽¹¹⁾.
I was
convinced when I visited the bombed reactor in 1982⁽¹²⁾.
This point should not be a matter of dispute for
any nuclear physicist or engineer who can easily do the calculations
for him(her)self. Indeed, I know of
no calculation, accurate or otherwise, that claims differently.
Moreover, the IAEA was planning to
place full time inspectors in Iraq once the reactor was operational,
which would have made any
plutonium production impossible.}

^{There is general agreement, for example in the
book by Obeidi⁽¹³⁾ also reviewed in
Nuclear
News, that the atomic bomb program really got moving in the late 1980s.
Indeed it seems that Iraq was
not in explicit violation of NPT (by separation of uranium isotopes)
till about 1988. The OSIRAK
reactor was destroyed by an unprovoked air raid in June 1981. It was
not until early in September 1981
that Saddam Hussein personally released Jafar from house arrest and
asked him to start and head the
clandestine nuclear bomb program. This fact supports the suspicion of
many of us.⁽¹⁴⁾ that the
destruction of OSIRAK did not stop an Iraqi nuclear bomb program but
actually started it. Worse still, the Israelis were so pleased with
themselves that it appears that neither they nor the CIA looked for and
understood the real direction of the Iraqi nuclear bomb program.
Therefore Claire's book is best read as
a description of how easy it is for non-technical people to misuse
technical information and come to
erroneous conclusions with the unfortunate result that honorable Iraqis
could easily be persuaded to
work on an atomic bomb that would be under the control of a tyrant.}

^{The main bomb program, separating uranium
isotopes with
Calutrons (EMIS), was unknown in
the west and a surprise. The Iraqis did what I speculated about in 1983
(reference 12, page 376
bottom of middle column) "I would build a separate secret facility in
another place". This secret facility was discovered by an IAEA team led
by David Kaye in June 1991 (somewhat sooner than described
by Hamsa) and it was destroyed. By 1988 there was also a smaller
centrifuge program under the
direction of Obeidi , which was also destroyed in June 1991 by order of
Saddam. This was declared to
the UN, together with the EMIS program, in July 1991 as part of the
third Iraqi declaration. In this third
declaration the centrifuge program was said to have been carried out in
one of the already destroyed
Tuwaitha buildings in order to save the original building in Rashdiyah,
where the centrifuge tests were
actually made, from destruction by the IAEA.}

Following Hussein Kamel's defection to Jordan in August 1995, orders were given by Saddam Hussein to disclose all hitherto undisclosed information about the entire WMD program. Then the building, where the centrifuge work was done, was properly declared. When Kamel was interviewed in Jordan (by Dr Ekeus and Dr Ziffero)⁽¹⁵⁾ he was asked: "why the Rashdiyah building was not declared?" He replied "there was absolutely nothing that remained there". The building originally "belonged to the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation."

^{That Iraq was interested in centrifuges was
no surprise to us
in the west. It was clear already in
1988 that Iraq had bought engineering drawings and parts to assemble a
small centrifuge with help from
German experts. I remember discussing and puzzling about the reasons
for this purchase with Richard
Kennedy, US ambassador to the IAEA soon afterwards. Iraq's commercial
attache in Bonn (whose
name has not yet been publicly disclosed) bought these centrifuge
drawings for Obeidi (a chemical
engineer) for the sum of 1 MUSD. In Obeidi's book he claimed that Kamel
acquiesced in his hiding
the drawings. In contrast Jafar writes that Obeidi claimed to have
turned then over to the Special
Republican Guards in May 1991, as ordered by Kamel, and insists that
they should have been handed
over to IAEA in 1995. They were one of the few unresolved points
between Iraq and the IAEA from
1997 until 2003. But the documents, cleverly buried in his garden,
eventually became Obeidi's visa to
the US. But the drawings were not enough, by themselves, to make a bomb!}

^{There is no issue that Saddam would have liked
to have
a nuclear bomb with which to balance
Israel's arsenal and threaten his neighbors. The rest of the world had
procedures, in the Non
Proliferation Treaty (NPT), for preventing him while allowing a nuclear
infrastructure for peaceful
purposes as envisaged in Eisenhower's famous Atoms for Peace speech.
The twin issues are whether
Israel was right to take unilateral action - which angered many people⁽¹⁶⁾ ⁽¹⁷⁾
and, as noted above, probably started an active, secret, bomb program,
which according to Jafar, was three years short of
success in 1991. Did the Israeli leaders know the technical details
about OSIRAK? Monachem
Begin's radio broadcast after the raid suggests that he did not⁽¹⁸⁾. But maybe he only realized
belatedly
and the plans for OSIRAK's destruction were too far advanced to stop.
On the other hand, the NPT
procedures we clearly inadequate in the 1980s. I saw more in one week
in 1981/2 than the IAEA
inspectors because I am curious. The inspectors were only allowed to
inspect what was declared. At
that time it was said of Dr Hans Blix of IAEA that he could not find a
grain of sand in the Sahara. Of
course not if the Sahara had not been declared! Now inspections are
much more intrusive.}

^{Since August 1945 the world has known how to
destroy itself.
During the cold war we were
very close to doing so. Cool heads and clear understanding of technical
details stopped us. As world
leaders contemplate the disarray of the recent NPT conference, some
leaders tend to urge action on the
basis of technically incorrect or incomplete and misleading
information. Let not us nuclear experts aid
and abet them.}

^{1. Rodger W.
Claire "Raid on the Sun: Inside Israel's Secret Campaign that Denied
Iraq the Bomb"
Broadway Books, (2004) pp288}

^{2. Khidirir Hamza
with Jeff Stein "Saddam's Bomb Maker" Scribner, (2000)}

^{3. Imad Khadduri,
"Iraq's nuclear mirage : memoirs and delusions" Toronto : Springhead,
(2003).}

^{4. Jafar Dhia
Jafar with Numan Saadaldin al-Naimy and Lars Sigurd Sunnana, "The
Assignment"
(2005) Spartacus, Oslo, Norway}

^{5. I deliberately
sat next to him at a small dinner party at Harvard's faculty club. At
that time I thought
OSIRAK was similar to DIMONA. The information that I told Neeman was
incorrect}

^{6. Richard Wilson
"Thoughts on a Muslim Bomb," Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 18, 1981.}

^{7. Yves Girard,
"Un neutron entre les Dents" (1997) Editions Rives Droite, Paris,
France. Girard
explained this point in more detail to Paul Lochak and myself at a
private dinner on 1995}

^{8. Report to UN Security
Council by Dr Ecklund, Director-General of IAEA. 19^th June
1981}

^{9. Paper by Dr Gruemm, IAEA
Bulletin, December 1981}

^{10. Testimony
in US Congress by Dr Herbert Koutz and Dr Eugene Weinstock, nuclear
proliferation
experts from Brookhaven National Laboratory July 1981}

^{11. Jafar D Jafar and Imad Khaddouri
"The
possible production of Pu²³⁹ from the IRT 2000
(OSIRAK) reactor" Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission report October 1978
made public in 1983}

^{12. Richard
Wilson "A visit to the bombed nuclear reactor at Tuwaitha, Iraq,"
Nature, 302, March
31, 1983}

^{13. Mahdi Obeidi (with Kurt Pitzer)
'The
Bomb in my Garden: Secrets of Saddam's Nuclear
Mastermind" John Wiley, (2004)}

^{14. E.g.
Richard Wilson "Iraq's Uranium Separation: The Huge Surprise", R.
Wilson, New
Outlook, Sept./Oct., 1991 p. 36.}

^{15. The
documents of the US debriefing of Hussein Kamel have been widely
circulated but I believe
that they are still officially secret}

^{16. Public statements by
Dr Bertrand Goldschmidt, Chairman, Board of Governors of IAEA, 9^th
June
1981 in most European newspapers}

^{17. UN Security
Council resolution 487 10^th June 1981}

^{18. Prime
Minister Begin described (non existent) rooms under the reactor for
producing and refining
plutonium. It seems that he was describing the Dimona reactor
buildings, details of which were made
public by Mordechai Vununu in the Sunday Times in August/September 1986}