The physicist who ran Iraq's nuclear weapons program for 25 years before the U.S. liberation claimed on Wednesday that Saddam Hussein gave up his nuclear ambitions in 1991 - even though the Iraqi dictator maintained a 500-ton stockpile of uranium and kept his nuclear research team intact right up until March 2003.More background on Jaffar Dhia Jaffar...
In his first-ever broadcast interview, Jaffar Dhia Jaffar told the BBC that Saddam's al Tuwaitha nuclear weapons research facility was heavily damaged in the first Gulf War.
"Everything was destroyed, such that the program couldn't be restarted at the time at all, and it never restarted," he claimed.
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Jafar also failed to address findings by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which concluded last month:
"Iraq was procuring dual use equipment that had potential nuclear applications."
The Senate's investigation found that, "Iraq had kept its cadre of nuclear weapons personnel trained and in positions that could keep their skills intact for eventual use in a reconstituted nuclear program."
The Iraqi physicist declined to challenge the testimony of top U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, who told Congress in March that Iraq had been "preserving and expanding its knowledge to design and develop nuclear weapons" throughout the 1990s.
One al Tuwaitha laboratory, Duelfer said, "was intentionally focused on research applicable for nuclear weapons development."
Duelfer's contentions were bolstered by satellite photos published in the Washington Post in 2002 that showed new construction at the sprawling 23,000-acre facility.
Iraq Watch:
In early March, Iraq's top two nuclear scientists decided to speak publicly about their country's banned weapon programs. While presenting a coauthored paper at a conference in Beirut, the "father" of Iraq's nuclear program, Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, admitted that Iraq tried to hide its weapon efforts when U.N. inspectors arrived in early 1991. But he claimed that all weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and weapon material were destroyed that summer. On the sidelines of the conference, Noman Saad al-Noaimi, a former director-general of Iraq's nuclear program, told the Associated Press that in his "personal estimation" Iraq was three years away from producing a nuclear bomb before the 1991 war. Both scientists said they were certain that Iraq did not revive any of its WMD programs after 1991.FAS.org:
During the conference, Jaffar called for a probe into what was known by U.N. inspectors before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. According to Jaffar, the inspectors had concluded that Iraq was free of nuclear weapons, but failed to declare this frankly to the U.N. Security Council because of U.S. pressure.
Iraq successfully concealed both the size and level of progress of its nuclear program. Four months after the June 1981 bombing by Israel of Iraq’s Osirak reactor, Jaffar Dhia Jaffar (deputy minister of industry, head of reactor physics at Tuwaitha and now believed to have been the head of Iraq’s nuclear weapon program) reportedly convinced Saddam Hussein that remaining in the NPT while embarking on a clandestine nuclear weapon program would present no serious difficulties...Washington Post:
The man some regard as the father of Iraq's nuclear weapons program never aspired to the title, according to former colleagues now living in the West. Hussein used imprisonment and torture to persuade the British-trained physicist to help him in his quest to become the Arab world's first nuclear-armed head of state.ABC News:
Among his punishments: being forced to watch as guards broke the back of an elderly man and left him to suffer in Jaffar's presence. "He recanted and returned to work," Hamza, a former subordinate, wrote in "Saddam's Bombmaker."
The deputy head of Iraq's atomic energy agency ultimately took command of Iraq's secret "Petrochemical-3" unit, which ran clandestine programs to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. At its height, the unit employed more than 20,000 people and cost an estimated $10 billion.
After his jailhouse conversion in the early 1980s, Jaffar promised to deliver Hussein a nuclear weapon within 10 years. By Western estimates he came very close -- perhaps as near as a few months -- when the program was disrupted by the outbreak of war in 1991.
Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, considered to be the godfather of Iraq's nuclear weapons program, is insisting that Iraq discontinued its nuclear weapons program after United Nations weapons inspections began in 1991, according to senior coalition intelligence officials.
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Jaffar fled to Syria soon after the military campaign in Iraq began, and surrendered to U.S. forces from a third Arab country.