SADDAM'S A-BOMBS

Just which route Saddam chose toward a nuclear bomb is not known to me, and the various news items have been very confusing. CNN items are highly unreliable due to the amateurishness of its editors; not to mention that the network is run by Hanoi Jane's boyfriend, who not long [ago] exhorted us to accept the fact that "com-munism is part of the fabric of this planet." An article by W. Safire in New Dimensions (a fairly new, good monthly) gives a few glimpses from his sources, though he was not able to evaluate them fully.

All ways of making a nuclear bomb start with uranium (in strict theory only, one could also make a thorium bomb), and it is sig-nificant for the much-touted international non-proliferation safeguards that nobody has any idea how much uranium is being mined in what places of the globe and where it goes, nor is such accounting required by the non-proliferation treaties. (l say this to point out the futility of such controls, not to advocate them.) Uranium ore and its milled, cleaned product, "yellowcake," is a commodity no more controlled than pig-iron or plywood; in much of the world you can have a ton of it in your basement and sell it to whom you like. Uranium has a halflife of 4.6 billion years, so that its radioactivity is barely detectable; however, as it decays, it will produce radon and highly active isotopes, whose radioactivity can be diluted by vigorous ventilation (to frustrate snoops).

99.3% of the yellowcake is U 238, which is not fissile, and about 0.7% is U 235, which is. There are two basic routes to a bomb: breed the U 238 into plutonium in a "production reactor" or separate the U 235 in a process known as "enrichment."

The plutonium route was tried by Saddam in the late 70s. It is utterly unrealistic to try to breed the uranium in power reactors into weapons grade plutonium, and in any case, Iraq does not have one. But it did have a French-built and installed Osirak research reactor near Baghdad, allegedly for research purposes. Such a re-search reactor can be used (and has been used, by India) to breed plutonium by very rapid burnup of the uranium; the idea is to breed plutonium 239 very rapidly, before the other plutonium isotopes contaminate it and produce a mixture of plutonium isotopes whose explosion will not only ''fizzle,'' but will do so at an unpredictable time. (This is one of the reasons why the plutonium produced in fuel rods of a power reactor, where burnup is slow, is quite unusable for bombs.)

Although one cannot be certain, it would appear that Saddam has abandoned this route. He is said to have been stung by swindlers who promised bomb-grade plutonium, but delivered nothing after he paid them $60 million. It is unlikely that anyone outside the nuclear club would have any bomb-grade plutonium to sell, and presumably not even China would have sold him any.

As for his own reactors, he had only small research reactors, a Soviet 2 MW reactor, and a French 600 kW reactor, both adjacent to the destroyed Osirac reactor. A fuel fabrication plant is also in the same complex about 10 miles from Baghdad. All of these, in-cluding the core of the destroyed Osirac reactor (highly enriched uranium, which could be salvaged) were inspected by the Interna-tional Atomic Energy Agency in November 1990, and no irregu-larities were found then. Any activity since might yield fissile material for at most one small bomb. My guess is that after his failed plutonium effort his next try was the uranium 235 road.