Iraq Nearly Had Own A-Bomb, U.N. Finds : Military: Baghdad could have developed the weapon in a year to 18 months, the inspection team says.

Iraq was within a year to 18 months of building a nuclear bomb and was already testing a missile system to deliver it when the Gulf War began, United Nations inspectors said here Friday.

David Kay--who headed a 45-member U.N. nuclear inspection team that was detained last month in Baghdad by Iraqi authorities in a dramatic three-day standoff before being permitted to leave--described the Iraqi weapons development program as an efficient, highly organized operation.

“It was a well-planned, well-managed program” in which more than 5,000 people were involved, he told reporters at a news conference here following his return from the region.

He said documents found in Baghdad indicated that design work was already advanced on a device to detonate a nuclear bomb and that testing had begun on a surface-to-surface missile capable of delivering the weapon outside Iraq’s own borders.

Neither Kay nor other senior officials from the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) attending the news conference would provide details on the missile’s type or whether it possessed enough range to strike at neighboring countries, such as Israel.

“They were beyond the planning phase,” said Kay, referring to the missile delivery system. “They were in a test phase. . . . The major unknown now is the presence of fissile material. On every other front, they had a working nuclear (weapons) program.”

Kay said evidence gathered during unannounced raids on two Baghdad document storage centers appeared to confirm earlier Western estimates that Iraq would have been able to produce enough weapons-grade enriched uranium for an implosion-type nuclear bomb within a period of one year to 18 months.

A seven-page preliminary report outlining the major findings of Kay’s inspection team was dispatched to the U.N. Security Council in New York late Thursday. The council is expected to debate the results early next week.

At the news conference Friday, the assembled experts did not discuss what Iraq’s present, postwar nuclear capacity may be.

But Pentagon officials have insisted that Iraq now is incapable of building nuclear weapons, as its facilities for doing so largely were destroyed in the Gulf War. Iraq had a larger nuclear program than U.S. experts originally believed, though American military officials now think most of the sites have been identified.

Iraq will not be a future nuclear threat to the world, as long as inspection efforts, such as those of the United Nations, continue and avert any realization of Baghdad’s atomic aspirations, U.S. officials have argued.

The U.N. report suggested that the Iraqi nuclear program may have been so large, and Baghdad has done so much to hinder outsiders’ knowledge of it, that “one may never discover the true extent of that program.”

Still, “the inspection team obtained conclusive evidence that the government of Iraq had a program for developing an implosion-type of nuclear weapon and it found documents linking this program with various ministries,” the team’s report concluded. “Documents were found showing that the nuclear weapons program was supported by broad-based international procurement efforts.

“Contrary to Iraqi claims of having only a peaceful nuclear program, the team found documents which showed Iraq had been working on both nuclear weapons designs and a surface-to-surface missile project, intended presumably as a delivery system for the weapon,” the report stated.

The report was based on a brief assessment of about 40,000 pages of Arabic text and hours of videotape of more than 10,000 pages of additional text.

Both Kay and IAEA Director General Hans Blix confirmed that evidence had been found linking Western businesses with Iraq. But until these documents have been translated and analyzed, it is not possible to determine exactly what these relationships were, they said.

Blix said it would be irresponsible to release the names of countries and companies involved until a link to the weapons program had been established. “There is a great deal of data in these documents and we have no interest in protecting such firms against publicity,” he said. “But at the same time, we want to handle such information in a responsible fashion.”

Kay said the preliminary report contains little detail on suppliers because they had not had time to trace specific commercial links with the program. “A lot of transactions are normal, trivial business transactions,” he said. “We’ll have to look at the data and let the data speak for itself.”

But Maurizio Zifferero, the IAEA deputy director general and chief of all the agency’s nuclear inspection teams, said Western-made machine tools had given Iraq the manufacturing capacity required to start its own weapons program. “There may have been some mistakes in allowing the export of these machine tools,” he said.

While Kay did not confirm the participation of foreign advisers on the Iraqi weapons program, he said his team had found what he called “evidence (on the subject) interesting enough that we decided to take it.”

The agency has so far dispatched six inspection teams to Iraq in connection with its mandate under U.N. Resolution 687 to “destroy, remove or render harmless” all materials in Iraq that can be used for nuclear weapons.”

A seventh inspection team is expected to arrive in Baghdad next Friday with the aim of following up evidence of a weapons program already uncovered and to arrange for the removal of Soviet and French uranium used in two research reactors.

The destruction of those two reactors in the early days of the Gulf War led President Bush to declare that allied aerial bombardments had “put (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein out of the nuclear bomb-building business for a long time to come.”

But subsequent evidence has indicated that the Iraqi weapons development program was run separately from the two research reactors, both of which had been subject to periodic international inspection to ensure uranium was not being diverted for weapons purposes.

Kay said seized documents appeared to confirm that Iraq was using the calutrons enrichment technology, used initially by U.S. scientists who developed the Hiroshima bomb nearly half a century ago.

It is a technology so costly, old and inefficient that proliferation experts had virtually overlooked it as a potential threat. The technique, developed in the early 1940s under a team headed by Ernest O. Lawrence, uses a large magnetic field to cull quantities of U-235 uranium isotope needed for a bomb from nonfissile U-238. Most information about the calutrons technology was declassified after World War II because the information was believed to be no longer critical.

IAEA spokesman David Kyd said what he called “a consensus view” among scientists familiar with the Iraqi program was that production of enriched uranium would have reached a level by the mid-1990s to sustain the production of two to three bombs a year.

Zifferero said there was no immediate evidence indicating that Iraq had managed to gain access to a more sophisticated, efficient enrichment technology developed by an Anglo-German-Dutch consortium, Urenco, using gas centrifuges to separate the fissile U-235 isotope. “This is all under investigation,” he said. “Give us time to look at the data carefully.”

Stanley Meisler at the United Nations and John M. Broder in Washington contributed to this story.

Iraq: On the Road to Nuclear Arms

What is needed to develop a nuclear weapon:

Sufficient amounts of enriched uranium.

Detonation devices.

Delivery system.

Where Iraq was in the process:

Testing surface-to-surface missile system to deliver a nuclear bomb when Gulf War began.

Using calutrons-enrichment technology, initially used by U.S. scientists who developed the Hiroshima bomb.

What Iraq lacked:

Sufficient amounts of enriched uranium. U.N. weapons inspectors say Iraq was about 12-18 months away from producing enough weapons-grade enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb.