My quote: We KNOW Saddam was trying to build nukes before the Gulf War flattened his country and set him back again.

This is a report describing the dismantling and obliteration of Iraq's nuclear program in 1997 before the inspections ceased. For all intents and purposes it is a final report of the disarmament process FORCED on Saddam by the Gulf War.

77. Although certain documentary evidence is missing and some gaps in knowledge remain, the following can be stated with regard to Iraq's clandestine programme:



- There are no indications to suggest that Iraq was successful in its attempt to produce nuclear weapons. Iraq's explanation of its progress towards the finalisation of a workable design for its nuclear weapons is considered to be consistent with the resources and time scale indicated by the available programme documentation. However, no documentation or other evidence is available to show the actual status of the weapon design when the programme was interrupted.

- Iraq was at, or close to, the threshold of success in such areas as the production of HEU through the EMIS process, the production and pilot cascading of single-cylinder sub-critical gas centrifuge machines, and the fabrication of the explosive package for a nuclear weapon.

- There are no indications to suggest that Iraq had produced more that a few grams of weapon-usable nuclear material (HEU or separated plutonium) through its indigenous processes, all of which has been removed from Iraq.

- There are no indications that Iraq otherwise acquired weapon-usable nuclear material.

- All of the safeguarded research reactor fuel, including the HEU fuel that Iraq had planned to divert to its "crash programme", was verified and fully accounted for by the IAEA and removed from Iraq.

- There are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of amounts of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance.



Now, depending on your faith in the inspection process, and given some big assumptions about what Saddam has been doing for the past four years, you might reasonably argue that Saddam does not at this moment have the equipment for making atomic bombs. If you had a lot more faith in Saddam than I do, and ignored all past behavior, you might even argue that he does not plan to develop atomic bombs.

But there is no way on Earth you can draw any other conclusion except that he had a full-scale nuclear weapons development program going when the Gulf War interrupted it.

For the record, Iraq became a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1969. According to defectors, their clandestine nuclear weapons program began in the early 1970s.