Iraq Admits It Can Produce A-Bomb Fuel

Bowing to American threats and United Nations pressure, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has revealed reluctantly that Iraq has the equipment needed to enrich uranium so it can be used in a nuclear bomb, officials said Monday.

A distrustful Bush Administration received the news warily, making clear that there would be no gloating until U.N. inspectors are shown all the equipment so it can be destroyed in accordance with the Security Council resolution that ended the Persian Gulf War.

State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler described the Iraqi admission, which came in a 29-page Arabic document delivered to the United Nations on Sunday night, as “a step forward.” But she added sharply: “We will judge Saddam Hussein’s pledges today by the actions of the Iraqi government, not by these words.”

Initial reports from Baghdad indicated that U.N. officials already are inspecting some of the material listed by Hussein, a sign that the tension created by Iraq’s recent efforts to hide its nuclear program from other U.N. inspectors could be easing.

After looking at one of the sites, Dimitri Perricos, the head of the latest team of U.N. inspectors, told reporters: “They have indicated that a large part of the equipment on the list has been eliminated and damaged by themselves . . . and buried in different burial sites.”

Perricos also quoted the Iraqis as saying that some of the equipment had been damaged by allied bombs during the war.

The Iraqi government sent its original inventory of nuclear material and equipment to the United Nations a few weeks after the end of the war. At the time, the U.S. government accused the Iraqis of supplying an incomplete list and concealing the nature of their nuclear program, a charge denied by Hussein’s government.

The latest document was delivered to U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar in New York and to the International Atomic Energy Agency on Sunday night. Although the note’s contents were not made public, the IAEA, in a statement Monday from its headquarters in Vienna, said the document “disclosed . . . details of an extensive nuclear program, an important part of which had not been declared earlier.”

The listed equipment, according to diplomatic sources quoted by the Reuters news agency, included 30 calutrons--devices developed during World War II to enrich uranium so it could be used in the first atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

The calutrons are believed to have been concealed in a 60-truck convoy that U.N. officials were prevented from inspecting June 28. Iraqi soldiers fired over the heads of the inspectors when they tried to look into the trucks.

The convoy incident led to a condemnation of Iraq by the Security Council and to threats by President Bush that Washington would exercise all its powers to make Iraq comply with the U.N. cease-fire resolution. Although Bush did not say that he intends to order military action against Iraq, he refused repeatedly to exclude such a move from his options.

The Hussein document, according to diplomatic sources, includes both a list of equipment and a section attempting to explain Iraq’s earlier attempt to conceal the items from the United Nations.

The Iraqi leader insisted that his country needs a nuclear program solely for peaceful purposes and added that national security had dictated his refusal to let outsiders know about the processes used by Iraq to create nuclear energy, the sources said.

According to the IAEA, the document revealed that Iraq had “three parallel programs for uranium enrichment” and that these programs had produced a little more than a pound of slightly enriched uranium. Although it had been revealed previously that Iraq possesed enriched uranium, it was not known that Iraq was able to produce the material itself.

The mention of three programs indicated that the Iraqis were enriching uranium through an electromagnetic system (using the calutrons), a centrifugal system and a chemical separation system.

Under the terms of the Gulf War cease-fire resolution, Iraq agreed to allow the destruction of its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

The intent was to render Iraq incapable of aggression again. U.N. inspection teams have encountered no problems inspecting other suspected weapons of mass destruction in two of the categories but hit numerous snags when they tried to look into the nuclear program.

White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said the document substantiated two U.S. contentions: “that Iraq has not, up till now, complied with United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 (the cease-fire resolution)” and that “Iraq continues to engage in various activities related to weapons of mass destruction.” Times staff writer Norman Kempster contributed to this story.