The Gunrunners of the Gulf : THE DEATH LOBBY: How the West Armed Iraq, <i> By Kenneth R. Timmerman</i> (<i> Houghton Mifflin</i> : <i> $21.95; 356 pp.)</i>

For four days last September, a team from the United Nations Special Commission was surrounded in an Iraqi parking lot as they guarded 45,000 documents of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission they had gathered during a surprise inspection. The team managed to abscond with its boxes of records, some of which should chronicle how foreign firms helped Saddam Hussein accumulate his fearsome arsenal.

One way to combat nuclear, chemical and biological weapons’ proliferation would be for the U. N. Special Commission to release this information to the public. Alternatively, inquiring minds can turn to Kenneth R. Timmerman’s book, “The Death Lobby.”

The firms that whetted Saddam’s appetite for tanks, aircraft and other conventional arms argue that they were only counterbalancing Iran in a desperate war for control of the Persian Gulf. This argument has some validity, but it doesn’t explain why, for example, French companies such as Thomas-CSF sold equipment of such high quality that French soldiers wondered whether they could rival Iraqi forces during Operation Desert Storm.

Firms that supplied Saddam with the wherewithal to make unconventional weapons had a different excuse: They had no idea that their chemicals, furnaces and specialty steel would be used to make nerve gas or nuclear weapons. German companies such as Karl Kolb GmB, Heberger Bau GmB and Thyssen Rheinstahl Technology had no discernible curiosity about their purchase orders, architectural drawings or construction work. These firms, like domestic dealers of semiautomatic rifles, easily absolved themselves of responsibility when a sales item became an instrument of mass murder. Substantive international controls of arms transfers are very difficult to negotiate. Until the laws governing such transactions are strengthened and enforced, shaming the exporters will have to do.

Timmerman shames with admirable thoroughness. An investigative journalist specializing in the deadly mayhem of the Middle East, his primary targets are “the greed of Western businesses, misguided analyses by the foreign-policy Establishment, and the incompetence of regulatory officials.” His chief villains are the French and the Germans. French presidents and prime ministers (whether Gaullist, Independent Republicans or Socialists) actively sought and secured $20 billion in orders from Saddam. France’s arms industries thrived on foreign sales: By 1985, Timmerman reports, three of four Exocet missiles off Aerospatiale’s production lines were headed for Iraq.

Germany was a different story, supplying parts and labor rather than finished products. Bonn looked the other way despite compelling evidence that Saddam was building his panoply of nerve and blister agents.

Timmerman’s supporting cast includes the Soviets, once Iraq’s almost exclusive supplier, now a competitor with the West for Saddam’s purchases; Belgian firms such as Union Miniere, Sybetra, Sixco and Mechime, which helped build Saddam’s “fertilizer” plants; the Egyptian government, which plied Saddam with used Soviet equipment, and the Chinese, now public enemy No. 1 in the arms-export market. The Reagan Administration helped as well, providing Saddam with satellite imagery to help with the targeting of his burgeoning arsenal.

Timmerman reports that a German company, Boswau und Knauer, constructed Saddam’s underground bunker beneath the presidential palace; French firms (Fougerolle and Spie Batignolles) built an underground escape route for the Iraqi leader at Saddam International Airport; Augusta Bell, an Italian subsidiary of the U.S. helicopter manufacturer, provided night-vision equipment. A Spanish company, Explosivos Alavesas, provided fuses for Saddam’s chemical arsenal; 38 West German companies were reportedly involved in the construction of one missile complex on the outskirts of Mosul. Saddam also depended on South African, Austrian, Brazilian, Chilean and Dutch companies for needed supplies.

In all, Timmerman’s survey of public records finds 45 companies, primarily Western, helping to build Saddam’s arsenal. From this, he concludes, wrongly, that the West armed Iraq. In point of fact, Saddam’s biggest supplier of combat aircraft and main battle tanks was, by far, the Soviet Union. In dollar terms, the Congressional Research Service has calculated that the U.S.S.R. sold three times more weaponry to Iraq from 1983 to 1990 than all other European states combined. In contrast, Moscow showed considerable restraint in supplying the building blocks for unconventional weapons, forcing Saddam to satisfy these needs primarily in Europe.

This distinction, and many of lesser note, are lost in Timmerman’s breathless prose. (Bureaucratic cables are never “sent” in these pages, they are “fired off.”) Experts in the proliferation field will find Timmerman’s analysis and prescriptions for action simplistic, and his account could no doubt benefit from primary sources of information such as those now held by the U.N. Special Commission.

For all its limitations, however, “The Death Lobby” presents a powerful indictment against all those who profited from Saddam Hussein’s shopping habits.

BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from “The Death Lobby,” see the Opinion section, Page 3.