Industrial Use Planned for Devices, Iraqis Say : Nuclear arms: Any use of atomic weapons ‘would be mutual suicide’ in the Mideast, ambassador says.

Iraqi officials denied Sunday that the electronic devices seized in a U.S.-British sting operation last week were to be used in nuclear weapons, saying they were instead purchased for unspecified industrial uses.

“Iraq has neither the capability nor the wish to produce nuclear weapons,” Nizar Hamdoon, Iraq’s deputy foreign minister, said Sunday.

He suggested that Iraq sought the U.S.-made capacitors, which can be used to trigger a nuclear explosion, for research on lasers or other commercial projects.

Hamdoon and Abdul Amir Anbari, Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations, acknowledged in U.S. television interviews that Baghdad possesses chemical weapons and the rockets to deliver them but insisted that the arms are purely defensive.

Any use of atomic weapons in the densely populated Middle East “would be mutual suicide,” Anbari said. “It would kill more Arabs, more Palestinians and Jordanians than any other adversary.”

Despite the Iraqi denials, U.S. officials continue to believe that Iraq bought the electronic triggers as part of a large-scale covert effort to develop nuclear weapons.

A U.S. grand jury in San Diego last week indicted five people and two British companies on charges that they conspired to smuggle secret nuclear technology from the United States to Iraq.

Court papers unsealed Thursday described an 18-month sting operation resulting Wednesday in the arrests of four Iraqi men and one French woman. Authorities said a San Diego firm tipped off U.S. Customs Service agents in September, 1988, to an Iraqi effort to buy specialized high-speed capacitors capable of setting off a nuclear explosion.

A shipment of 40 triggers, under close U.S.-British surveillance, was flown to London early in March, where authorities switched dummy devices for the triggers. The suspects were picked up on Wednesday as crates containing the devices, labeled as air-conditioning units, were loaded aboard an Iraqi Airways jetliner bound for Baghdad.

The Iraqi officials said Sunday that the capacitors, ordered by Iraq’s Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, have numerous non-military applications and were not part of an effort to develop atomic bombs.

“The device which Iraq ordered, as you know, has mostly purposes, usages, in commercial, scientific and medical as well as military and nuclear devices, and there are thousands of products like that,” Anbari said on ABC’s “This Week with David Brinkley.”

And he noted pointedly that Iraq has no reactor to process fuel for nuclear weapons. Israeli warplanes destroyed Iraq’s Osirak research reactor in 1981 because of fears that it was being built to produce enriched uranium for nuclear warheads.

All of Iraq’s arms are defensive, Anbari said, “to deter any aggressor, whether Israeli, Iranian or anyone else. That is why we have developed long-range missiles, medium-range missiles, short-range missiles. . . . We have no capability to manufacture a nuclear device. Period. This should . . . put an end to all the speculations.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) scoffed at the Iraqis’ protestations of innocence.

“If (the) remarks were not so disturbing it would be almost amusing because the facts are the Iraqis have for over a decade been attempting to acquire nuclear capability,” he said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

The purchase of the weapons components is “in keeping with the messianic mission of (Iraqi leader) Saddam Hussein to become the dominant force in the Mideast through the use of force and acquisition of weapons of mass destruction,” McCain said.

The United States should make clear that it will “exercise all options, including military if necessary,” to prevent Iraq from developing nuclear weapons, the senator said.

Hamdoon said Iraq used chemical weapons during the 10-year war with Iran and acknowledged that the poison gas attacks “in some instances had some effect on civilians.”

Western analysts and human rights groups have accused Baghdad of slaughtering thousands of ethnic Kurds as well as Iranian civilians in attacks with chemically armed rockets, bombs and shells.

Hamdoon said his government is prepared to discuss a regional ban on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons but would not accept sanctions aimed at Iraq alone.

Sen. William S. Cohen (R-Me.) said Sunday on ABC that the U.S. government and private industry have contributed to the Mideast arms race by selling weapons of all descriptions to virtually every nation in the volatile region.