|
Us not inspected iraq nuclear facility { April 25 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35498-2003Apr24.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35498-2003Apr24.html
washingtonpost.com
U.S. Has Not Inspected Iraqi Nuclear Facility
Site That Contained Uranium Was Looted After War
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 25, 2003; Page A14
KUWAIT CITY, April 24 -- Nearly three weeks after U.S. forces reached Iraq's most important nuclear facility, the Bush administration has yet to begin an assessment of whether tons of radioactive material there remain intact, according to military officials here and in Washington.
Before the war began last month, the vast Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center held 3,896 pounds of partially enriched uranium, more than 94 tons of natural uranium and smaller quantities of cesium, cobalt and strontium, according to reports compiled through the 1990s by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Immensely valuable on the international black market, the uranium was in a form suitable for further enrichment to "weapons grade," the core of a nuclear device. The other substances, products of medical and industrial waste, emit intense radiation. They have been sought, officials said, by terrorists seeking to build a so-called dirty bomb, which uses conventional explosives to scatter dangerous radioactive particles.
Defense officials acknowledge that the U.S. government has no idea whether any of Tuwaitha's potentially deadly contents have been stolen, because it has not dispatched investigators to appraise the site. What it does know, according to officials at the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command, is that the sprawling campus, 11 miles south of Baghdad, lay unguarded for days and that looters made their way inside.
Tuwaitha is headquarters of Iraq's Atomic Energy Agency, with hundreds of structures covering some 120 acres. At the height of Iraq's clandestine nuclear weapons program, which nearly succeeded in building a bomb in 1991, Tuwaitha incorporated research reactors, uranium mining and enrichment facilities, chemical engineering plants and an explosives fabrication center to build the device that detonates a nuclear core.
The facility was inspected more often than any other site by U.N. inspectors, who began disarming Iraq under U.N. Security Council mandate in 1991.
Disputes inside the U.S. Defense Department and with other government agencies have slowed the preparation of orders for a team of nuclear experts to assess Tuwaitha, officials said. Though it anticipated for months that war would leave it with responsibility for Iraq's nuclear infrastructure, the Bush administration did not reach consensus on the role it would seek at those facilities.
President Bush's senior advisers have accused the IAEA, under Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, of being hostile to U.S. objectives in Iraq. Civilian policy officials in the Pentagon, according to people with first-hand knowledge, initially proposed to make a complete inspection of Tuwaitha without the IAEA -- an exercise that apparently would have required U.S. government experts to break seals the agency's inspectors placed on safeguarded nuclear materials. The nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, of which the United States is a signatory, gives the IAEA exclusive authority over those seals.
Strong objections came from other parts of the Pentagon policy apparatus and from the State Department offices responsible for treaty compliance, international organizations and nonproliferation.
The unresolved dispute has prevented Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld from issuing guidance to U.S. Central Command that would define the objectives and limits of a site survey.
Lt. Col. Michael W. Slifka, a senior leader at Central Command's Sensitive Site Exploitation Planning Team, said U.S. forces had not broken any IAEA seals. But he said in an interview here that he did not know whether seals had been broken by others, because he had not been authorized to dispatch a team with nuclear experts from the Energy Department's national laboratories.
"For force protection reasons, because of the folks we've got there," Slifka said, "we aren't in a position to go inside."
"The site is now secured by coalition forces," he said. "They're safeguarded." Slifa said technicians had taken readings and "established safe zones" to protect U.S. forces and civilians, "but we've left it at that."
A defense official made available to describe the policy tonight said there are "tentative plans" for "a U.S. assessment team to enter the site once a team can be organized and properly equipped." The official emphasized that the team would not break IAEA seals and added: "The issue of the IAEA's role in this process will be addressed once we have a better idea from the assessment team on the actual status of the buildings, containers and materials at the site."
A second official said that formula only deferred the harder questions. "The intent is to inventory the site and to make a determination what if anything is missing," he said, and that cannot be done without a full inspection.
Outside experts expressed astonishment today that the government had not treated the possibility of missing nuclear materials with greater urgency.
"It's extremely surprising," said Corey Hinderstein, deputy director of the Institute for Science and International Security, when told that U.S. nuclear experts had not yet been to Tuwaitha. "I would have hoped that they would try to assess as quickly as possible whether the site had been breached. If there is radiological material on the loose in Iraq, with the chance that it may be transferred across borders, it would be extremely important to know that [in order] to prevent it from crossing a border or being transferred to a terrorist or another state."
Working through the late 1990s against what it then called "Iraq's prevarication" and an "endeavor to conceal the [nuclear weapons] program in its entirety," the IAEA seized more than 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium -- sufficient to build a nuclear bomb -- and supervised the destruction of a weapons infrastructure encompassing 10 major centers around Iraq.
The agency eventually concluded that the weapons program had been expunged, an assessment disputed by the Bush White House. The IAEA turned to "ongoing monitoring and verification" of sites it had already disarmed. As part of that effort, it placed tamper-proof seals on many rooms at Tuwaitha and on at least 409 barrels of radioactive material.
Until fighting began on March 19, those seals were believed to have remained intact and Tuwaitha's three major storage structures were secured by Iraq's Special Republican Guard. But when a U.S. Marine engineers reached the site on April 6, the Marines found it abandoned.
Iraqi locals told the Marines, according to situation reports sent through Central Command, that the last of the guards had departed four days earlier. The Marines reported that some of the buildings showed evident signs of looting. Until receiving reinforcements, the small unit was unable to prevent further intrusions by Iraqis who cut through barbed wire fencing and stole inside.
The IAEA's ElBaradei has said publicly that his agency holds the only lawful authority over Tuwaitha's safeguarded materials. Officials in the U.S. government and the IAEA said there have been no substantive discussions between them on the terms of a postwar survey there.
"It's worrisome," said an expert with long experience at Tuwaitha who is familiar with ElBaradei's views. The IAEA, he said, "would like to quickly understand if there has been any diversion, any disappearance, because the sooner we know, the sooner we can do something about it."
Staff researcher Robert Thomason contributed to this report.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
|
|
