In March 2002 I attended one of the regular Foreign and Commonwealth Office meetings on nuclear non-proliferation. We were told by a senior official that Iraq had reassembled its nuclear scientists and was reconstituting its nuclear weapons programme, which had been completely disbanded by UN inspectors after the 1991 Gulf War. In September 2002, Downing Street published its dossier claiming that Iraq had 'sought . . . uranium from Africa' and had imported hundreds of aluminium tubes alleged to be for use in uranium enrichment. Both claims, if true, would be signs of renewed Iraqi nuclear activity. Yet Dr Imad Khadduri, who worked in the Iraqi nuclear programme from 1968 until he left for Canada in 1998 and was involved in most major Iraqi nuclear activities in those thirty years, wrote in November 2002 in a Canadian journal that he found the 'allegations about Iraq's nuclear capability, as continuously advanced by the Americans and the British, to be ridiculous'.

LRB 2 September 2004 | PDF Download