Made Our Own ‘Triggers,’ Iraq Says : Arms race: President Hussein also claims that not all of the shipped devices were intercepted.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein claimed Tuesday that his country’s military scientists have produced high-technology capacitors similar to those that U.S. and British authorities intercepted in March and said were meant to be used as triggers for nuclear weapons.

Hailing the purported breakthrough as a victory for Arab nations, Hussein displayed two of the devices at a Baghdad rally broadcast on state-run Iraqi television. And he suggested that the U.S. Customs Service operation that blocked shipment of American-made capacitors at London’s Heathrow Airport failed to intercept all of them.

“The ones they seized were not all that crossed,” he said, producing a device that he claimed had slipped through the security net. “Can this detonate a nuclear bomb? I haven’t seen a nuclear bomb . . . but this is one of the capacitors they talked about, of which they did not capture all.”

A capacitor is a device with two or more conducting plates separated by insulation; it is used to store an electric charge.

Angered by an American government charge in a federal court in California that Iraq is attempting to make nuclear weapons, Hussein declared at the time of the London seizure and the arrests of alleged Iraqi agents that Western powers were attempting to restrict technological advances by Iraq and other Arab countries. The U.S. operation, he claimed, was part of a Western conspiracy to create an atmosphere that would encourage Israel to strike Iraqi military targets, as it did in the 1981 bombing of a nuclear reactor outside Baghdad.

Any further Israeli strike, Hussein vowed then, would be answered with Iraqi binary chemical--nerve gas--weapons that would destroy “half of Israel.”

The seizure by British authorities last month of high-tech tubing that the London officials said were designed to create a barrel for a giant cannon further antagonized the Iraqi leadership. Iraqi authorities said the tubing was designed for petrochemical projects.

Boasting of his government’s ability to overcome the Western actions, Hussein told 2,000 delegates to an Iraqi Arab solidarity rally Tuesday:

“Only five days after the Americans said they (had seized smuggled capacitors), our young men in the military industry managed to produce” two similar capacitors. “If the British or the Americans want to import some of these devices, which are labeled ‘Made in Iraq,’ ” Hussein crowed, “they can negotiate a deal with the Ministry of Industry and Industrialization. . . .”

At the time of the Heathrow operation, Hussein denied that Iraq was trying to make nuclear weapons. According to press reports of Hussein’s remarks in Baghdad on Tuesday, he made no similar disavowal.

But in Vienna on Tuesday, officials of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency said that inspection of Iraqi nuclear facilities in early April uncovered no evidence that the government is diverting nuclear materials to military use.

Iraq is a signatory to the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which obliges it to open its nuclear facilities to IAEA inspection.

In the course of its 1980-88 war with Iran, Iraq bought and developed military technology--including medium-range rockets potentially capable of delivering chemical and nuclear warheads--that has made it the military heavyweight of the Arab world.