As troops amassed on his border near the start of the Persian Gulf War, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein weighed the pur- chase of a $150 million nuclear "package" deal that included not only weapons designs but also production plants and foreign experts to super- vise the building of a nuclear bomb, according to documents uncovered by a former UN weapons inspector.
The offer, made in 1990 by an agent linked to dis- graced Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, guaranteed Iraq a weapons-assembly line capable of producing nuclear warheads in as little as three years. But Iraq lost the chance to capitalise when, months later, a multinational force crushed the Iraqi army and forced Hussein to abandon his nuclear ambitions, according to nuclear weapons expert David Albright, who describes the deal in a new book.
Iraqi officials at the time appear to have taken the offer seriously.They asked the Pakistanis for sample drawings as proof of their ability to deliver, the doc- uments show.
"With the assurance of (Iraqi intelligence agency) Mukhabarat... the offer is not a sting operation," an Iraqi offi- cial scrawls in ink in the mar- gin of one of the papers.
Khan's alleged interest in sell- ing nuclear secrets to Hussein has been reported in many books and news articles. An internal Mukhabarat memo that surfaced in the late 1990s discussed a secret proposal by one of Khan's agents to sell a nuclear weapons design for an advance payment of $5 million.
But the newly uncovered doc- uments suggest Khan's offer of nuclear assistance was more comprehensive than known. A 1990 letter attributed to one of his business associates offered Iraq a chance to leap past tech- nical hurdles to acquire weapons capability.
"Pakistan had to spend 10 years and $300 million to get it," begins one of the memos.
"Now, with the practical expe- rience and worldwide contacts Pakistan has developed, you could have A.B. in about three years time and by spending about $150 million." `A.B.' was understood to mean "atomic bomb", Albright wrote in Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America's Enemies, released this week.
At the time of the offer, Iraq was embarked in a crash pro- gramme to develop N-weapons in the face of a threatened US- led attack over its occupation of Kuwait. By that date, Iraqi scientists had acquired a limit- ed amount of weapons-grade enriched uranium but lacked key components, including a workable design for a small nuclear warhead.
The alleged offer to Iraq is broadly similar to proposals Khan reportedly made to Libya and Iran in the 1980s and 1990s.
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