TRIGGER, DELIVERY, TIME

Supplies of uranium are no big problem for Saddam. He can use local ore, which may be low-grade, but that is only a matter of more money to extract the uranium. Trigger technology is now fairly widely known, and there is no reason to suppose he cannot get scientists to do what India did two decades ago. (The principle of triggering a plutonium or uranium bomb is the same: sudden, explosive assembly of subcritical masses into a critical mass; the details may be different.) Delivery is no unsurmountable problem, as Saddam's Scuds have shown. With the sudden shifts of alliances among the Arab dictatorships any embargoes or other political patches are bound to be short-lived.

The fact that the US does not honor its treaties (e.g. the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) does not help matters, either, and Sad-dam, though ably playing a cat-and-mouse game by giving permis-sion to inspect any place from which the uranium and its enrichment apparatus have been removed, must be frustrated with Bush. With a guy like Gorbachev you know he will break his promise; with Thatcher, you knew she would keep it; but with this guy Bush, you never know whether he will break it or not . . .