PETROCHEMICAL 300

is the code name for Saddam's nuclear program, which may even have planned the construction of a hydrogen bomb.

Imagine: The US, UN and IAEA can go in there with cars, trucks and helicopters and search the whole country at will, search the files of government agencies and do pretty well anything else they like now, and still they have not yet uncovered the entire nuclear effort, most of which was left intact in the bombing. Some say that the small and easily hidden modules of the entire project will never be completely discovered. And remember that Iraq is a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty.

What then of countries like Syria which are equally militant, led by an equally treacherous dictator, but do not let any inspections (other than the preannounced token inspections of IAEA) into the country? For all we know Assad has a nuclear program as developed as Saddam's, and if this is not true now, it will be true for many other Third World dictatorships in the future. Eventually such countries could threaten not just Israel, but the US itself.

The answer, of course, is SDI, and it is absurd of the Hon. rep-resentatives in the House of Check-Bouncers and Dinner Cheats to claim it is no longer needed because the cold war is over.

It is equally reckless to say that nuclear weapons are no longer needed because the cold war is over. They may very well be used to shoot down approaching missiles or to make them ineffective with bursts of high-energy gamma rays. It is, in any case, a decision that ought to be left to military experts, not to cheap demagogues.