COLUMN ONE : Honeywell Factor in Iraq Bomb : Memos show that staffers objected to the project, but the American firm provided information that helped Baghdad develop a fearsome explosive.

If U.S. troops go to war against Iraq, the deadliest weapon unleashed on them by Saddam Hussein’s forces could be stamped “Made in America.”

Over the objections of its own engineers, Honeywell Inc. provided agents for Iraq with technology for developing fuel-air explosives, devices 10 times more powerful than conventional weapons and considered by some experts to be “a poor man’s nuclear weapons.”

Along with design data for a missile warhead armed with fuel-air explosives, the 300-page Honeywell study obtained by Iraq describes ways to inflict the maximum damage and listed the most vulnerable targets--personnel, air bases, planes, naval ports, oil refineries and ships.

The story of the role played in Iraq’s development of these weapons by Honeywell, one of America’s biggest defense companies, illustrates what critics see as both the laxity of U.S. export controls and the peril facing U.S. troops as a result of this country’s quiet aid to Iraq during its eight-year war with Iran.

The case also shows how, with such technology transfers perfectly legal and tacitly encouraged by the Reagan and Bush administrations, executives and engineers at private companies were left to use their own judgment about the proliferation of U.S. weapons technology in volatile regions such as the Mideast.

“We have made the mistake for all too long of considering some nations friends and others enemies, and we eventually find out that, in some cases, our friend is really our enemy,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has proposed legislation to toughen U.S. laws restricting the spread of weapons technology.

The Honeywell physicist who compiled the fuel-air explosive study in 1984 said it was sold to an intermediary for Iraq over strong objections from company insiders, an assertion supported by internal Honeywell memos. He said he omitted some potent data because he and others were worried about introducing the weapon into the Mideast.

“That it could be aimed at our soldiers is my worst nightmare come true,” said Louis Lavoie, who retired from Honeywell five months ago.

Honeywell, which designed fuel-air explosive bombs for the U.S. military, sold the study to a Swiss firm acting for Iraq and Egypt, according to company documents and military and congressional sources.

At the request of five senators, the Pentagon is investigating the use of U.S. technology in Iraq’s development of fuel-air explosives and other weapons. Honeywell representatives have met with investigators, but the Defense Department said it is not specifically investigating the company.

Honeywell hired an outside law firm to conduct its own inquiry into whether the technology was transferred improperly. The Minneapolis company’s chairman, James Renier, said information that Honeywell’s technology was provided to Iraq, first reported by NBC News, was “very disturbing.”

A Honeywell spokeswoman, Susan M. Eich, said the design data obtained by Iraq appears to consist of unclassified material that was already available. She said the company does not believe that the information is sufficient to allow the building of a fuel-air explosive weapon, or FAE for short.

Yet a copy of the 1984 Honeywell FAE study obtained by The Times says the “little information available” was combined with “our own expertise in this area” to develop data for an FAE warhead for a missile.

A preliminary Pentagon review determined that no laws were violated, because the Honeywell material was not classified or restricted under export laws. Rather, in obtaining the Honeywell data, Iraq appears to have exploited regulations--something it did in more than a dozen Western countries as part of its billion-dollar campaign to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Two Iraqi efforts to buy FAE bombs from U.S. military surplus and from an American arms company were blocked by the U.S. government because the actual devices are subject to strict export controls as “significant military weapons.” Instead of the bombs, Iraq bought the technology to develop its own FAEs.

This was far from an isolated example of Iraq’s ambitious acquisition effort. A Senate Foreign Relations Committee report identifies 132 companies from 14 Western nations that sold military-related goods to Iraq, including 68 German firms and 10 from the United States.

A report for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles names 86 German firms and 18 American firms that sold equipment to Iraq that could be used to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Much of this equipment was so-called dual-use technology, which has commercial and military applications. The U.S. government eased export controls on such devices bound for Iraq in an effort to ensure Iran’s defeat in the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran War.

With U.S. troops now facing the results of this policy, Congress has tried to tighten restrictions. But last month, President Bush vetoed export-control legislation that would have imposed mandatory trade sanctions on nations that use chemical weapons. Instead, on Dec. 13 the White House announced its own plan to stem the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

At the same time, however, Bush approved long-delayed export licenses for the sale of supercomputers to India, China and Brazil. The approval drew praise from business interests and complaints from critics worried about the potential use of the computers in designing nuclear weapons.

FAEs were developed by U.S. Navy researchers at China Lake, Calif., who exploded the first one in 1960, according to U.S. patents and the Honeywell report. The device was refined for several years before being dropped from the U.S. arsenal after the Vietnam War because it did not fit in with other strategic priorities.

The FAE device involves two precisely timed detonations. The principle is similar to filling a room with natural gas and tossing in a match.

The bomb contains fuel, usually propane or ethylene oxide, in one or more separate canisters. An initial explosion disperses the fuel over the target, resulting in a massive cloud of gas and air. The second detonation ignites the mixture, creating a huge fireball and a powerful shock wave.

The magnitude of these blasts is a subject of debate. Some experts say that FAEs are far more powerful than conventional explosives and that the resulting fireball and shock wave carry the devastation over a wide region. Others say FAEs pack little more punch than conventional explosives.

In public, the Pentagon has played down the threat from the FAEs in Iraq’s arsenal, saying they do not shift the strategic balance in a potential conflict.

In simulating a near-miss with an FAE device, the Navy placed the weapon on a barge and floated it near a decommissioned destroyer escort off San Clemente Island. The distance of the blast from the ship is classified, but damage was so severe that the ship had to be towed to deep water, where it sank.

FAEs were used by U.S. forces to clear landing zones and minefields in Vietnam, and witnesses reported that even small devices leveled patches of forest the size of a football field.

FAEs are most effective in relatively flat regions--such as the desert--where the shock waves spread without interference from hills and other obstructions.

Iraq’s attempts to obtain FAEs date to at least 1984, when the country was locked in its fierce war with Iran.

Iraq, Egypt and Argentina were jointly developing the Condor II, a missile with a projected 1,500-mile range. A Justice Department report said they planned to build 10 missiles in Argentina, with five each going to Iraq and Egypt. Iraq then wanted to set up its own production plant.

In 1984, the Egyptian Ministry of Defense tried to buy 9,000 surplus FAE bombs from the U.S. government, according to court records. The Egyptians claimed the bombs were to clear minefields, but a Justice Department report later said they were actually for use with the Condor II project. The request was turned down.

Simultaneously, a Swiss company called IFAT Corp. was trying to obtain FAE technology for the Condor II, according to the court records, which result from a federal criminal case in Sacramento involving arms smuggling to Egypt and Iraq. IFAT is identified in the court files as an entity established by the Egyptian Ministry of Defense as part of the Condor II project’s attempt to acquire various weapons.

In mid-1984, Keith G. Smith, a British consultant to Honeywell who also worked for IFAT, approached Honeywell’s aerospace and defense subsidiary in Bracknell, England, about obtaining technology for an FAE warhead.

The request to compile a study detailing how to build and use an FAE warhead was relayed to Minneapolis and eventually passed on to engineers and physicists within the aerospace and defense group.

At the time, employees at the lower levels were told that the data that was to be compiled on designing an FAE warhead would go to Egypt through a Swiss firm, according to Lavoie, the retired Honeywell physicist.

The assignment alarmed some employees because Honeywell’s weapons work was done solely for the U.S. government or for foreign governments working through U.S. authorities, Lavoie said.

“It occurred to us that this might really be going to Iraq or Iran,” he said. “Quite candidly, we felt that it was bad enough that it was going to Egypt. Anything of that nature going to that part of the world is dangerous.”

Lavoie’s supervisor, John Beckmann, objected in a memo to his boss that said, “The proposition . . . has a malodorous quality about it, (is) immoral, violates Honeywell principles and is not in the best interests of Honeywell.”

Another internal Honeywell memo called the sale of the FAE technology “a shady deal.”

According to Lavoie, the complaints went up through three levels within Honeywell before the project was approved by “someone on Mahogany Row,” a reference to the company’s corporate executives. He said he does not know which executive actually approved the project. “Someone up the chain at Honeywell said it was OK to do, and that’s the point where everything becomes a mystery,” he said.

Eich, the Honeywell spokeswoman, said the outside lawyers are examining documents and interviewing current and former employees to determine how the project was approved within the company.

Lavoie said his research dealt with the chemicals and physics of creating a fuel cloud and how to detonate it. He said the analysis of the blast’s effect on targets was done by Honeywell engineers at Bracknell.

During that time, Smith, the British consultant, made at least two trips to Honeywell in Minneapolis, Lavoie said. The resulting analysis was provided to Smith late in 1984, and Lavoie estimated that the price was about $200,000. Attempts to reach Smith by The Times were unsuccessful.

The copy of the Honeywell analysis obtained by The Times shows that the company developed designs for an FAE warhead and precise information about its destructive capacity. Lavoie said he “sanitized” his findings by omitting data on the most exotic and powerful potential fuels for FAEs and leaving out some equations that had been developed through research for the U.S. military.

The study is dramatic, nonetheless. It describes a warhead capable of blanketing a wide area with a death cloud using fuels “easily obtainable as output from a petroleum refinery,” and details a simultaneous attack by six missiles armed with FAE warheads.

The damage inflicted by FAEs depends on the blast size and its proximity to the target. The study depicted 100% fatalities across a wide area, with injuries decreasing to lung and eardrum damage in outlying areas. Major structural damage to refineries, aircraft and ships was predicted for a large area, and a map of an airfield lists the potential damage to its various components.

A Pentagon weapons expert said FAEs are perfect for desert use.

“The flatter the better,” the source said. “FAEs are a terrible danger to our troops.”

Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm, a major German defense firm, also provided FAE data that found its way to Iraq. A company spokesman acknowledged that MBB had provided studies and tested portions of an FAE bomb as part of the Condor II project.

The joint Iraq-Egypt-Argentina project was stopped before any missiles were built but, intelligence sources say, not before Egypt passed the FAE technology to Iraq, which continued to pursue development of FAEs on its own.

One place Iraq sought help in turning the FAE designs into weapons was Cardoen Industries, a Chilean arms manufacturer and major supplier to the Baghdad regime.

“We developed with Iraq a very close relationship when Iraq was considered to be the savior of the Western world in stopping Iran,” said Fernando Paulsen, the chief spokesman for Cardoen Industries in Santiago.

He acknowledged that Cardoen built a factory in Iraq to manufacture television tubes during peacetime or electronic fuses for FAEs and cluster bombs during wartime. He said the factory was two-thirds done when Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2 and work was halted.

There is no way to determine what technology was used, but in April, 1989, Iraq displayed two FAE bombs at a weapons show in Baghdad. Pentagon sources said they do not know if Baghdad has developed a dependable FAE warhead for missiles. The missiles would be a major threat because superior American air power is expected to keep most Iraqi aircraft on the ground in the event of war. Defending against missiles would be harder.

FAEs pose another potential danger. Although the Honeywell report does not mention it, Navy researchers at China Lake designed FAEs that spew chemical and biological weapons over vast areas.

“My gut feeling is that it would work,” said Elisa D. Harris, a chemical weapons specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Without knowing how far U.S. research progressed in this area, Harris said, “I can’t tell you whether or not FAEs would work for dispersing chemical and biological weapons. And we don’t know whether Iraq has the technical ability to do it.”

American commanders of Operation Desert Shield are well aware that Iraq is widely believed to have used chemical weapons against Iranian troops and against Iraq’s own Kurdish population. But those chemicals, also developed using Western technology, were delivered by aircraft and artillery.

“What we do know,” said a Pentagon intelligence source, “is that there isn’t a weapon that Saddam has developed that he hasn’t used.”