SADDAM'S NUCLEAR ARSENAL

Soon after Bush prematurely declared victory, allowing more than 700 Iraqi tanks and 100,000 men to escape, he also declared that Saddam's nuclear capabilities had been destroyed.

These two blunders were among several points of turning a won battle into a lost war.

Saddam's nascent nuclear weapons production was one of the main reasons why America went to war. The Bush administration was unbelievably careless to think that destroying Saddam's offi-cial, or even secret, reactors would destroy his nuclear program. For a mere $25 (a subscription to AtE) they might have been stimulated into considering the reasons why uranium was more likely bomb material than plutonium, and that the Iraqis might have more equipment than British agents intercepted.

Reactors can be made to breed weapons grade plutonium with sufficiently quick burn-up of uranium. But not only is a reactor necessarily large, immobile and difficult to keep secret, it also re-quires a sophisticated infrastructure, including highly trained per-sonnel, to produce weapons-grade plutonium. It took India, a scientific giant, 10 years to succeed; and that road had been shut for Iraq by the Israeli bombers who destroyed the Osirac research reactor in 1981, earning the official condemnation of the Reagan administration. As explained in AtE [Mar 91], the obvious road for Saddam would therefore be a uranium bomb.