U.N. to Seek Hidden Iraqi Nuclear Sites

U.N. experts are planning to seek to inspect possible sites where Iraqi President Saddam Hussein may have secreted nuclear materials that could be used to create atomic weapons, diplomats said Friday.

The diplomats said that a special commission appointed by the Security Council to supervise the removal of all of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in the last few days had asked various governments to provide any intelligence information they might have about the location of any chemical and nuclear weapons facilities Iraq might be concealing.

The new inquiries were prompted in large part by an Iraqi nuclear scientist who turned himself in to U.S. troops in northern Iraq. The scientist told debriefers that the Baghdad government operated secret sites for nuclear research and development that were not destroyed by allied bombing during the Persian Gulf War.

And while the defector’s information remains largely unproven, it contained enough authenticity to provoke stepped up attention by both the U.N. and the Bush Administration to the possibility that Hussein might be hiding nuclear facilities.

“There is a very strong feeling that the Iraqis are not telling the United Nations the whole truth,” said a Western diplomat familiar with the work of the special Security Council commission charged with eliminating Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons arsenal and nuclear weapons potential.

On Friday, Iraq’s delegation to the United Nations formally complained in a letter to Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar that the United States was conducting stepped up aerial reconnaissance in northern Iraq around Mosul, where the defector said one secret underground nuclear facility was situated.

The letter from Hussein’s government charged that the flights were designed for “observation and provocation.”

U.N. officials said that the defector provided information that Iraq before the war was trying to produce weapons-grade uranium through a relatively old-fashioned technique called magnetic isotope separation.

U.S. scientists experimented with the method during development of the atomic bomb during World War II but abandoned it for more sophisticated technology.

But intelligence experts using information from shipments to Iraq from such nations as Germany and Great Britain suspected that Iraq also was seeking to develop much more sophisticated means of enriching uranium using gas-operated centrifuges.

The Security Council resolution setting down conditions for the formal end of the Gulf War required Iraq to provide the United Nations with an inventory of all its weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear materials.

On April 27, the Baghdad government revealed that some nuclear materials were shifted from locations during the war to lessen the possibility of accidents.

Iraq is among the signers of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty under which nations pledge not to build nuclear weapons and to open nuclear research sites to international inspection.

After the Persian Gulf War ended, International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors visited Iraq in May and placed some of its enriched uranium under seal at a nuclear facility in Tuwaitha. Iraqi officials claimed additional enriched uranium was buried in the debris of the plant largely destroyed by allied bombing.

But U.N. diplomats familiar with the inspection team’s work said that the searchers for nuclear materials encountered difficulties in dealing with the Iraqi government during the start of their visit and even considered cutting the visit short and returning to Vienna at one point.

U.N. officials in Geneva said that a team checking a list provided by Iraq of chemical weapons sites would leave Iraq today. The officials said the team was not trained to look into nuclear weapons production and would not travel to the area near Mosul where the defector claimed one of the additional nuclear facilities was located.

But the U.N. officials stressed that the International Atomic Energy Agency was going to investigate all sites that arise.

The Bush Administration has asked the United Nations to investigate all sites where nuclear facilities may be secreted.