Iraq’s Rush to Get Nuclear Bomb for Gulf War Disclosed : Arms: Baghdad tried to build weapon by April, 1991, U.N. and U.S. officials say. Team also reveals efforts to make 200 biological warheads and strain of deadly toxin.

Iraq launched a crash effort in 1990 to produce a nuclear bomb for use against U.S.-led forces massing in the Persian Gulf after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, U.S. and U.N. officials disclosed Friday.

The effort, which accelerated an existing nuclear weapons program, was aimed at producing a weapon for use by April, 1991. The project was a response to the massive buildup in the Gulf region by a U.S.-led coalition that took Baghdad by surprise, according to Pentagon sources.

To make the weapon, Iraqi scientists planned to illegally take fuel from Iraq’s nuclear reactors, which then were monitored by international inspectors.

The secret project is the most serious of a range of revelations about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction since the Aug. 8 defection of a key aide to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. For more than four years, Iraq had hidden all information about the project, but with the defection Baghdad handed over a mass of documents to the United Nations in an attempt to lessen the impact of the aide’s disclosures.

Baghdad also had a program to produce and deploy almost 200 biological warheads--in bombs, artillery shells and missiles--that could have hit Saudi Arabia and Israel, U.N. officials said. The bacterium anthrax was loaded in at least 50 bombs, and botulin--a toxin that causes botulism--had been loaded into 100 bombs before the war, they said. Germ agents also were loaded into 25 missile warheads.

“That was a super-secret program. That was the great equalizer for Iraq,” U.N. special envoy Rolf Ekeus said in New York on Friday after returning from Baghdad, where Iraqi officials described the program to him. Ekeus is in charge of finding and dismantling Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction as one condition for the lifting of the U.N. sanctions against Baghdad.

For their germ warfare program, Iraqi scientists also grew a strain of aflatoxin, which is produced from a potentially poisonous and cancer-causing fungus found on peanuts and corn, U.N. officials disclosed Friday. In the past, Iraq had admitted to developing only anthrax and botulin.

Baghdad’s nuclear facilities were heavily bombarded by U.S. forces in January, 1991.

The war and the damage inflicted on Iraq did not eliminate the threat of non-conventional warfare from Baghdad, senior U.S. officials asserted Friday. Since the Persian Gulf War’s end, Iraq has rebuilt “bigger and better” facilities than those destroyed by the punishing U.S. air bombardment.

The officials said a facility formerly used to produce chemical weapons at Habbaniyah is now rebuilt and producing chemical pesticides. It could be rapidly converted to produce deadly toxins. A missile facility at Al Kindi, which now tests surface-to-air missiles, could be converted “overnight” for use to produce surface-to-surface missiles banned under the U.N. cease-fire resolutions, according to senior Pentagon officials.

In Vienna, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday that Iraq now has turned over a number of high-quality steel parts that can be used to produce components for nuclear weapons. Among other things, the parts are common in centrifuge systems that enrich uranium, a pivotal step in making nuclear bombs.

Hans Blix, head of the international agency, informed the U.N. Security Council on Friday that the disclosures did not “substantially alter” previous conclusions that Iraq’s nuclear program is “fundamentally under control.” But U.S. officials countered that the agency’s credibility is questionable after it gave Iraq a clean bill of health a year ago.

In interviews Friday, U.S. officials detailed the “suspicious movements” that had warranted moving up the timing of U.S. maneuvers in the Persian Gulf and redeploying ships and equipment.

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Since July, Iraq’s Republican Guard has engaged in a series of exercises to practice rapid deployment, complete with tanks loaded and ready to roll. Baghdad also has commandeered civilian transport to replace hundreds of tank transporters not operational since the war, Pentagon officials said.

Even if Baghdad does not intend to cross the border into Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, U.S. military planners fear that it might still be preparing to move its troops below the 32nd Parallel, a line that the Republican Guard is not allowed to cross under agreements ending the war.

During the 1991 Gulf War, Baghdad backed down from using its weapons of mass destruction, according to U.N. officials, after then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III warned in a meeting with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz in Geneva that the U.S. would respond with devastating force.

Ekeus said Aziz told him on his most recent trip to Baghdad that the Iraqi leadership assumed that Baker’s warning meant the U.S. would retaliate with nuclear weapons.

Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, on Friday called the latest revelations “chilling” because they made clear how close Iraq had been to using weapons of mass destruction.

Despite Iraq’s disclosures about its massive biological weapons capabilities, U.S. sources said Friday that Baghdad is still hiding an active, loaded germ warhead, as well as other weapons of mass destruction.

At the United Nations, Ekeus briefed Security Council members behind closed doors on his trip to Baghdad and discussions in Amman, Jordan, with Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel Hassan Majid, the defector who is both Hussein’s son-in-law and the former head of Iraq’s military procurement program.