U.S. Marines have located an underground nuclear complex near
Baghdad that apparently went unnoticed by U.N. weapons inspectors. Hidden beneath the
Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission's Al-Tuwaitha facility, 18 miles south of the capital, is a
vast array of warehouses and bombproof offices that could contain the "smoking
gun" sought by intelligence agencies, reported the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
"I've never seen anything like it, ever," said Marine Capt. John Seegar.
"How did the world miss all of this? Why couldn't they see what was happening
here?"
Marine nuclear and intelligence experts say that at least 14 buildings at Al-Tuwaitha
indicate high levels of radiation and some show lethal amounts of nuclear residue,
according to the Pittsburgh daily. The site was examined numerous times by U.N. weapons
inspectors, who found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
"They went through that site multiple times, but did they go underground? I never
heard anything about that," said physicist David Albright, a former International
Atomic Energy Agency inspector in Iraq from 1992 to 1997.
In a 1999 report, Albright said, "Iraq developed procedures to limit access to these
buildings by IAEA inspectors who had a right to inspect the fuel fabrication
facility."
"On days when the inspectors were scheduled to visit, only the fuel fabrication rooms
were open to them," he said in the report, written with Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi
nuclear engineer who defected in 1994. "Usually, employees were told to take to their
rooms so that the inspectors did not see an unusually large number of people."
Chief Warrant Officer Darrin Flick, the battalion's nuclear, biological and chemical
warfare specialist, said radiation levels were particularly high at a place near the
complex where local residents say the "missile water" is stored in mammoth
caverns.
"It's amazing," Flick said. "I went to the off-site storage buildings, and
the rad detector went off the charts. Then I opened the steel door, and there were all
these drums, many, many drums, of highly radioactive material."
Noting that the ground in the area is muddy and composed of clay, Hamza was surprised to
learn of the Marines' discovery, the Tribune-Review said. He wondered if the Iraqis went
to the colossal expense of pumping enough water to build the subterranean complex because
no reasonable inspector would think anything might be built underground there.
"Nobody would expect it," Hamza said. "Nobody would think twice about going
back there."
Michael Levi of the Federation of American Scientists said the Iraqis continued rebuilding
the Al-Tuwaitha facility after weapons inspections ended in 1998.
"I do not believe the latest round of inspections included anything underground, so
anything you find underground would be very suspicious," said Levi. "It sounds
absolutely amazing."
The Pittsburgh paper said nuclear scientists, engineers and technicians, housed in a plush
neighborhood near the campus, have fled, along with Baathist party loyalists.
"It's going to take some very smart people a very long time to sift through
everything here," said Flick. "All this machinery. All this technology. They
could do a lot of very bad things with all of this."
Marine Capt. Seegar said his unit will continue to hold the nuclear site until
international authorities can take over. Last night, they monitored gun and artillery
battles by U.S. Marines against Iraqi Republican Guards and Fedayeen terrorists.
The offices underground are replete with videos and pictures that indicate the complex was
built largely over the last four years, the Tribune-Review said.
Iraq began to develop its nuclear program at Al-Tuwaitha in the 1970s, according to the
Institute for Science and International Security. Israel destroyed a French-built reactor
there in 1981, called "Osiraq," and a reactor built by the Russians was
destroyed during the 1991 Gulf War.
In his 2000 book "Saddam's Bombmaker," Hamza revealed Saddam's secret plans for
the nuclear complex at Al-Tuwaitha:
From my office window in the Nuclear Research Center, I could see just a slice of what
Saddam's oil money had built in less than a decade: a sprawling complex of nuclear
facilities, scattered over ten square miles, poised to deliver us the bomb. It was called
al-Tuwaitha, in Arabic "the truncheon."
… Below my floor was fifty thousand square feet of office space and laboratories,
sparkling with new equipment, where hundreds of technicians were running nuclear
experiments. Outside to my left was our chemical reprocessing plant, where we would enrich
fuel for a plutonium bomb. Down the street was our domed Russian reactor, newly renovated
with Belgian electronic controls, which made it capable of generating radioactive material
for nuclear triggers. Past that was our French-supplied neutron generator, and next to
that our electronics labs, and then a four-story building that handled spent nuclear fuel,
full of hot cells and new remote-controlled equipment overseen by platoons of
white-jacketed technicians. All this was a long, long way from the dining room table where
we'd scratched out our first memo for a bomb in 1972.
Rising up behind my office, however, was al-Tuwaitha's jewel in the crown, the aluminum
dome of the French reactor, glittering in the blue desert sky. Osiraq was the most
advanced reactor of its kind, crammed with such up-to-date equipment and technology that
visitors were amazed that the French had ever agreed to sell it to us. Little did they
know that the acquisition of Osiraq, an incredible feat on its own, was merely a decoy:
Saddam wanted us to copy the French design and build another, secret reactor, where we
would produce the bomb-grade plutonium beyond the prying eyes of foreign spies and
inspectors – the same thing to him.
But it was not to be. On June 7, 1981, Israel sent eight F-16 warplanes almost 700 miles
over Jordanian, Saudi and Iraqi air space for hours without detection. By flying in tight
formation, they generated a radar signal resembling that of a commercial airliner. Upon
identifying the Osiraq nuclear plant, and catching Iraqi defenses by surprise, the Israeli
pilots managed to demolish the reactor in one minute and 20 seconds.
At the time, Israel's audacious preemptive strike was almost universally condemned, but
later praised by many for helping thwart Iraq's development of nuclear weapons.
Despite this and other setbacks, says Hamza, Saddam persisted in his quest for a nuclear
bomb. In testimony before Congress last August, Hamza – the architect of Iraq's atom
bomb program -- said that if left unchecked, Iraq could have had nuclear weapons by 2005. |
