GlobalSecurity.org In the News

Is Iraq Building a Nuclear Bomb?

By David Stevenson

Images taken last October by an Ikonos spy satellite show what intelligence experts call "unexplained construction" around sites associated with Iraq's nuclear weapons program. Those images were released just as a new report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies indicates Iraq is likely years away from producing nuclear weapons. But as "Tech Live" reports tonight, experts still say there is cause for concern.

GlobalSecurity.org's John Pike says the nation already has the know-how; now it just needs the nuclear material.

"There are basically two things you need to build a nuclear weapon," Pike said. "One of them is the technical expertise. The other thing you need is the fissionable material, the secret ingredient that actually explodes."

It's all in the materials

In other words, material such as enriched uranium. If Iraq can obtain fissionable material, the IISS report says, the country could assemble nuclear weapons within months.

"Iraq's strategy I think would be, No. 1, try to buy it on the black market," Pike said. "There's no indication, though, that there is an active black market in large quantities of weapons-grade uranium."

Instead, Pike says, the nation is probably attempting to produce the material itself. It's a strategy that former UN weapons inspector Jay Davis says Iraq may have begun pursuing immediately after inspectors pulled out of the country in 1998.

"The question is where would they actually be doing the enrichment?" Davis said. "The problem is the satellite imaging alone can't tell you what the buildings are being used for. And that's why the international community wants to get the inspectors back in."

Davis says Iraq's need for secrecy means it has moved from duplicating America's World War II-era atomic bomb technology to a less-cumbersome strategy.

"They would never rebuild the electromagnetic enrichment program because it's too big, it's too easy to see," Davis said. "A centrifuge facility that would have the equivalent output of enriched uranium would fit in a fairly large garage somewhere."

Which is why the Ikonos photos are at the center of a debate between the United States and the United Nations over whether Iraq is on the road to becoming a nuclear nation, and whether the United Nations should step in to stop it.