U.N. Aide Tells of Key Iraq Tests Toward A-Bomb

Iraq successfully tested key parts of a nuclear bomb just months before its invasion of Kuwait but could not have produced a complete weapon, a U.N. nuclear expert said Friday.

A spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed a report by British television Thursday which said Iraq made 20 successful tests on key components of a bomb in the first five months of 1990.

But he denied assertions by the Channel Four news program that Iraq just had to put the system together to be able to explode a nuclear bomb.

“They did make about 20 tests, but these are all small aspects--important, but on a very small scale, and they don’t have the material on a scale large enough for a bomb,” Hans Mayer said.

The Channel Four program quoted U.S. expert Stephen Bryen as saying he believes Baghdad still has the means to make a bomb despite U.N. efforts to destroy its nuclear potential following Iraq’s defeat in the Gulf War.

But Mayer said the IAEA maintains that while Iraq was developing nuclear weapons it did not have sufficient material for a bomb.

“As far as enriched uranium and plutonium is concerned, we have always had the clear feeling that they were not that far,” Mayer said.

“Now we have destroyed their enrichment facilities and their equipment as far as we have got it.”

IAEA inspectors have made several trips to Iraq since the end of the Gulf War to search for evidence of a nuclear weapons program under the U.N.’s drive to destroy Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological and ballistic arms capability.

Mayer added that another IAEA inspection team is leaving for Iraq Sunday to remove unused nuclear fuel and ship it to the Soviet Union.