Iraq Denies Making, Testing Radiation Bomb

Iraq Denies Making, Testing Radiation Bomb

By Irwin Arieff

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Iraq denied on Friday it had produced or tested a radiation bomb more than a decade ago, but acknowledged it considered such a weapon and abandoned the effort as impractical.

A letter from Iraq's U.N. ambassador, Mohammed Aldouri -- apparently Baghdad's first public admission it had weighed making a radiological bomb -- said an Iraqi technician had conceived of the idea of the weapon in 1987, when Baghdad was locked in a long war with neighboring Iran.

Radiological bombs are aimed exclusively at humans, intended to cause severe illness and slow death through radiation sickness rather than destroy their targets with explosive power.

Iraq's denial contradicts its own documents given to the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1995, which show Baghdad made the weapon and tested it three times.

UNSCOM issued public reports to the Security Council on the bomb in 1995 and 1996, when it was in charge of ridding Baghdad of weapons of mass destruction as required under U.N. Security Council resolutions. Iraq has been under U.N. sanctions since 1990 when it invaded Kuwait.

Aldouri's letter, however, was mainly a reaction to an April 29 New York Times article which quoted from Baghdad's classified documents.

Aldouri, in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites), said Iraqi specialists ``explored the technical and practical aspects of this idea, and they ascertained it was not feasible.''

``They abandoned it on the grounds that it was not efficacious and would cause soil contamination that it would be difficult to clean up after the expulsion of the invaders. The idea died, and no radiological bombs were manufactured and none were tested,'' Aldouri wrote.

UNSCOM documents from Iraq give extensive details of the test results and the reasons for pursuing developing of the bomb and then abandoning the project in 1987.

The Iraqi document says the bomb, 12 feet long and weighing more than a ton, was tested three times before being dropped as ineffective. It said Baghdad irradiated a mixture of zirconium, hafnium, uranium and iron in its Tuweitha nuclear power plant 12 miles south of Baghdad to make the weapon. The plant was later bombed in 1991 during the Gulf War (news - web sites).

The mix was chosen in part because its radioactivity dissipates relatively quickly, making such a weapon hard to trace and analyze after use, according to the Iraqi document.

The document, still stamped ``top secret'' is now posted on the Internet at http://www.iraqwatch.org.

Aldouri's letter dismissed the New York Times report as the work of ``the mouthpiece of world Zionism'' and accused the United Nations (news - web sites) and the United States of ``leaking and distorting'' the information relied on by the newspaper ``for the purposes of the United States-Zionist policy of aggression against Iraq.''

Philip Reeker, a State Department spokesman, told reporters on April 30 the experiments with the bomb showed the need for keeping sanctions on Baghdad.

Iraq continued in its efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction ``and that's our primary reason that we insist on strong controls to prevent Iraq from acquiring items of concern that would aid them in that goal,'' Reeker said.

Documents uncovered in 1995 showed that Iraq, after invading Kuwait in 1990, also launched a crash program to test its first nuclear bomb, using highly enriched uranium.

The target date for a test was April 1991. But the Gulf War intervened in January 1991, destroying many Iraqi facilities.