A new type of rocket found in Iraq
Inspectors say chemicals could cover wide area
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN JR. WITH STEVEN R. WEISMAN
THE NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON -- U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq recently discovered a new variety of rocket seemingly configured to strew bomblets filled with chemical or biological agents over large areas, U.S. officials say.
The reconfigured rocket warheads appear to be cobbled together from Iraq's stockpiles of imported or home-built weapons, some of which Iraq had used with both conventional and chemical warheads. Iraq contends that it has destroyed all its old chemical warheads, a claim that the inspectors have not verified.
A U.S. official who described the weapon said it was discovered in the last few months, since the U.N. inspectors returned to Iraq in November. At first, he said, Iraq told the inspectors that it was designed as a conventional cluster bomb, which would scatter explosive submunitions over its target, and not as a chemical weapon. A few days later, he said, the Iraqis conceded that some might have been configured as chemical weapons.
The distinctive appearance of the rockets' cluster munitions, heavy metal balls with holes in them, suggested their use as a way to disperse chemical or biological weapons, said the official.
"If you take the kinds of fuses we know they have, and you screw them in there, when these things come out from the main frame, and they explode inward, chemical agents come out," he said.
"These can be used for biological weapons, too."
U.S. officials said that this discovery, buttressed by information contained in a detailed, 173-page report by the inspection team, cataloging the history of Iraqi weapons programs and the United Nations' attempts to enforce compliance with its disarmament resolutions over the last 12 years, showed that Iraq could not be trusted to cooperate with the inspectors.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday that the chief inspector for chemical and biological weapons, Hans Blix, should have made more of the evidence in that report when he appeared before the Security Council last week.
"When you look at page after page of what the Iraqis have done over the years to hide, to deceive, to cheat, to keep information away from the inspectors, to change facts to fit the latest issue, and once they put that set of facts before you, when you find those facts are false, they come up with a new set of facts -- it's a constant pattern," he said on "Fox News Sunday."
Powell did not mention the rocket, but cited development of drone aircraft capable of dispensing chemical weapons as another example, and hinted that the United States would release more information about weapons as the council debates a resolution this week.
According to the detailed report by the inspection team, Baghdad has a long history of exploring novel approaches for chemical and biological weapons.
It remains unclear whether the Iraqi cluster warhead is a newly developed one, devised during the absence of inspectors over the last four years, or whether its existence was kept secret before 1998, when the inspectors left.
The report, a copy of which has been provided to The New York Times, mentions that Iraq was known since 1996 to have been working on new chemical warheads at a facility known as Haidar Farm, where inspectors had discovered caches of documents and other evidence of prohibited programs with which to confront the Iraqi regime.
Videotapes from Haidar, the report said, showed "personnel conducting tests of a cluster bomb that appears to utilize submunitions based, in part, on 122-mm warhead components."
As early as 1988, Iraq subsequently admitted to the United Nations, it had experimented on converting short-range "Frog" rockets with a cluster warhead using aluminum shells and some components from another rocket, the Ababil 50. However, Iraq said that it had done nothing but produce drawings and that no prototypes were built.
When the evidence of these programs from Haidar Farm was analyzed in 1997, intelligence agencies supporting the U.N. weapons inspectors said materials found there included "all the necessary files and specifications to build" an unconventional, probably chemical, warhead for the Frogs.
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