'Even if Iraq managed to hide these weapons, what they are now hiding is harmless goo'
Thursday September 19, 2002
The Guardian
guardian.co.uk
UN weapons inspectors are poised to return to Iraq, but does
Saddam Hussein have any weapons of mass destruction for
them to find? The Bush administration insists he still has
chemical and biological stockpiles and is well on the way to
building a nuclear bomb. Scott Ritter, a former marine officer
who spent seven years hunting and destroying Saddam's
arsenal, is better placed than most to know the truth. Here, in
an exclusive extract from his new book, he tells William Rivers
Pitt why he believes the threat posed by the Iraqi dictator has
been overstated.
Pitt: Does Iraq have weapons of mass destruction?
Ritter: It's not black-and-white, as some in the Bush
administration make it appear. There's no doubt that Iraq hasn't
fully complied with its disarmament obligations as set forth by
the UN security council in its resolution. But on the other hand,
since 1998 Iraq has been fundamentally disarmed: 90-95% of
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability has been verifiably
eliminated. This includes all of the factories used to produce
chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and long-range
ballistic missiles; the associated equipment of these factories;
and the vast majority of the products coming out of these
factories.
Iraq was supposed to turn everything over to the UN, which
would supervise its destruction and removal. Iraq instead chose
to destroy - unilaterally, without UN supervision - a great deal of
this equipment. We were later able to verify this. But the
problem is that this destruction took place without
documentation, which means the question of verification gets
messy very quickly.
. P: Why did Iraq destroy the weapons instead of turning them
over?
R: In many cases, the Iraqis were trying to conceal the
weapons' existence. And the unilateral destruction could have
been a ruse to maintain a cache of weapons of mass
destruction by claiming they had been destroyed.
It is important to not give Iraq the benefit of the doubt. Iraq has
lied to the international community. It has lied to inspectors.
There are many people who believe Iraq still seeks to retain the
capability to produce these weapons.
That said, we have no evidence that Iraq retains either the
capability or material. In fact, a considerable amount of evidence
suggests Iraq doesn't retain the necessary material.
I believe the primary problem at this point is one of accounting.
Iraq has destroyed 90 to 95% of its weapons of mass
destruction. Okay. We have to remember that this missing 5 to
10% doesn't necessarily constitute a threat. It doesn't even
constitute a weapons programme. It constitutes bits and pieces
of a weapons programme which, in its totality, doesn't amount to
much, but which is still prohibited. Likewise, just because we
can't account for it, doesn't mean Iraq retains it. There is no
evidence that Iraq retains this material. That is the quandary we
are in. We can't give Iraq a clean bill of health, therefore we can't
close the book on its weapons of mass destruction. But
simultaneously we can't reasonably talk about Iraqi
non-compliance as representing a de facto retention of a
prohibited capability worthy of war.
Nuclear weapons
R: When I left Iraq in 1998, when the UN inspection programme
ended, the infrastructure and facilities had been 100%
eliminated. There's no debate about that. All of their instruments
and facilities had been destroyed. The weapons design facility
had been destroyed. The production equipment had been hunted
down and destroyed. And we had in place means to monitor -
both from vehicles and from the air - the gamma rays that
accompany attempts to enrich uranium or plutonium. We never
found anything. We can say unequivocally that the industrial
infrastructure needed by Iraq to produce nuclear weapons had
been eliminated.
Even this, however, is not simple, because Iraq still had
thousands of scientists who had been dedicated to this nuclear
weaponisation effort. The scientists were organised in a very
specific manner, with different sub-elements focused on different
technologies of interest. Even though the physical infrastructure
had been eliminated, the Iraqis chose to retain the
organisational structure of the scientists. This means that Iraq
has thousands of nuclear scientists - along with their knowledge
and expertise - still organised in the same manner as when Iraq
had a nuclear weapons programme and its infrastructure. Those
scientists are today involved in legitimate tasks. These jobs
aren't illegal per se, but they do allow these scientists to work in
fields similar to those in which they had work where they were,
in fact, carrying out a nuclear weapons programme.
There is concern, then, that the Iraqis might intend in the long
run to re-establish or reconstitute a nuclear weapons
programme. But this concern must be tempered by reality. That
is not something that could happen overnight. For Iraq to
reacquire nuclear weapons capability, they would have to build
enrichment and weaponisation capabilities that would cost tens
of billions of dollars. Nuclear weapons cannot be created in a
basement or cave. They require modern industrial infrastructures
that in turn require massive amounts of electricity and highly
controlled technologies not readily available on the open market.
P: Like neutron reflectors, tampers...
R: Iraq could design and build these itself. I'm talking more
about flash cameras and the centrifuges needed to enrich
uranium. There are also specific chemicals required. None of
this can be done on the cheap. It's very expensive, and readily
detectable.
The vice-president has been saying that Iraq might be two years
away from building a nuclear bomb. Unless he knows something
we don't, that's nonsense. And it doesn't appear that he does,
because whenever you press the vice-president or other Bush
administration officials on these claims, they fall back on
testimony by Richard Butler, my former boss, an Australian
diplomat, and Khidir Hamza, an Iraqi defector who claims to be
Saddam's bomb-maker. And of course, that's not good enough,
especially when we have the UN record of Iraqi disarmament
from 1991 to 1998. That record is without dispute. It is well
documented. We eliminated the nuclear programme, and for Iraq
to have reconstituted it would require undertaking activities
eminently detectable by intelligence services.
P: Are you saying that Iraq could not hide, for example, gas
centrifuge facilities, because of the energy the facilities would
require and the heat they would emit?
R: It is not just heat. Centrifuge facilities emit gamma radiation,
as well as many other frequencies. It is detectable. Iraq could
not get around this.
Chemical weapons
R: Iraq manufactured three nerve agents: sarin, tabun, and VX.
Some people who want war with Iraq describe 20,000 munitions
filled with sarin and tabun nerve agents that could be used
against Americans. The facts, however, don't support this. Sarin
and tabun have a shelf-life of five years. Even if Iraq had
somehow managed to hide this vast number of weapons from
inspectors, what they are now storing is nothing more than
useless, harmless goo.
Chemical weapons were produced in the Muthanna state
establishment: a massive chemical weapons factory. It was
bombed during the Gulf war, and then weapons inspectors came
and completed the task of eliminating the facility. That means
Iraq lost its sarin and tabun manufacturing base.
We destroyed thousands of tons of chemical agent. It is not as
though we said, "Oh we destroyed a factory, now we are going
to wait for everything else to expire." We had an incineration
plant operating full-time for years, burning tons of the stuff every
day. We went out and blew up bombs, missiles and warheads
filled with this agent. We emptied Scud missile warheads filled
with this agent. We hunted down this stuff and destroyed it.
P: Couldn't the Iraqis have hidden some?
R: That's a very real possibility. The problem is that whatever
they diverted would have had to have been produced in the
Muthanna state establishment, which means that once we blew
it up, the Iraqis no longer had the ability to produce new agent,
and in five years the sarin and tabun would have degraded and
become useless sludge. All this talk about Iraq having chemical
weapons is no longer valid.
P: Isn't VX gas a greater concern?
R: VX is different, for a couple of reasons. First, unlike sarin and
tabun, which the Iraqis admitted to, for the longest time the
Iraqis denied they had a programme to manufacture VX. Only
through the hard work of inspectors were we able to uncover the
existence of the programme. We knew the Iraqis wanted to build
a full-scale VX nerve agent plant, and we had information that
they had actually acquired equipment to do this. We hunted and
hunted, and finally, in 1996, were able to track down 200 crates
of glass-lined production equipment Iraq had procured
specifically for a VX nerve agent factory. They had been hiding it
from the inspectors. We destroyed it. With that, Iraq lost its
ability to produce VX.
All of this highlights the complexity of these issues. We clearly
still have an unresolved VX issue in Iraq. But when you step
away from the emotion of the lie and look at the evidence, you
see a destroyed research and development plant, destroyed
precursors, destroyed agent, destroyed weapons and a
destroyed factory.
That is pretty darned good. Even if Iraq had held on to stabilised
VX agent, it is likely it would have degraded by today. Real
questions exist as to whether Iraq perfected the stabilisation
process. Even a minor deviation in the formula creates proteins
that destroy the VX within months. The real question is: is there
a VX nerve agent factory in Iraq today? Not on your life.
P: Could those facilities have been rebuilt?
R: No weapons inspection team has set foot in Iraq since 1998.
I think Iraq was technically capable of restarting its weapons
manufacturing capabilities within six months of our departure.
That leaves three-and-a-half years for Iraq to have manufactured
and weaponised all the horrors the Bush administration claims
as motivations for the attack. The important phrase here,
however, is "technically capable". If no one were watching, Iraq
could do this. But just as with the nuclear weapons programme,
they would have to start from scratch, having been deprived of all
equipment, facilities and research. They would have to procure
the complicated tools and technology required through front
companies. This would be detected. The manufacture of
chemical weapons emits vented gases that would have been
detected by now if they existed. We have been watching, via
satellite and other means, and have seen none of this. If Iraq
was producing weapons today, we would have definitive proof,
plain and simple.
[CONTINUED]
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