The Twilight of the Bombs Read online

  Brother President Mubarak told me [that the Kuwaitis] were scared. They said [Iraqi] troops were only 20 kilometers north of the Arab League line. I said to him that regardless of what is there, whether they are police, border guards or army, and regardless of how many are there, and what they are doing, assure the Kuwaitis and give them our word that we are not going to do anything until we meet with them. When we meet and when we see that there is hope, then nothing will happen. But if we are unable to find a solution, then it will be natural that Iraq will not accept death, even though wisdom is above everything else. There you have good news.

  Glaspie told Saddam44 she would carry the good news to America.

  Before she left Iraq, Glaspie cabled a report to the State Department on her meeting with Saddam. George Bush responded with a message mollifying the Iraqi leader that Glaspie delivered on 28 July. Coming from the president, it carried far more weight with Saddam Hussein than the representations of a mere ambassador:

  The United States and Iraq both45 have a strong interest in preserving the peace and stability of the Middle East. For this reason, we believe that differences are best resolved by peaceful means and not by threats involving military force or conflict. I also welcome your statement that Iraq desires friendship, rather than confrontation, with the United States. Let me reassure you … that my administration continues to desire better relations with Iraq.… We still have fundamental concerns about certain Iraqi policies and activities. And we will continue to raise these concerns with you, in a spirit of friendship and candor, as we have in the past, both to gain a better understanding of your interests and intentions and to ensure you understand our concerns.

  What Saddam Hussein made of Bush’s message is evident from what followed. Iraq had begun massing forces on the Kuwaiti border in July. While a travesty of negotiations played out between Iraq and Kuwait, all international flights from Kuwait City sold out, and so many Kuwaitis moved funds out of the country that the government blocked all further overseas electronic funds transfers.46 Kuwait’s small army, on the other hand, having finished its midsummer maneuvers, stood down, and most of its officers left on vacation.

  At eleven p.m. on 1 August 1990, American technicians from Westinghouse who were manning a tethered radar-observation balloon near the Kuwait border with Iraq called the commander of the U.S. Army unit that advised the Kuwaiti Army. “Their reports were very pointed,”47 writes one of the U.S. officers posted to Kuwait at the time. “They described the radar paint as a mass armor formation resembling an iron pipe several kilometers long and rolling downhill. They were advised to cut the tether and move out smartly. By 0100, 2 August 1990, the Iraqi formation was rapidly moving south along the Abdaly highway totally unopposed.”

  * An atomic bomb can be made with either HEU or plutonium. Uranium, refined from common minerals, is enriched through a large-scale, laborious industrial process; plutonium, a man-made element, is bred from uranium by neutron bombardment in a nuclear reactor and then chemically separated. Natural uranium consists primarily of two variant physical forms called isotopes and designated by the total number of protons and neutrons in their nuclei: U238 (99 percent of natural uranium) and U235 (0.7 percent). Only U235 both fissions and chain-reacts. A reactor with the right moderator—material such as graphite or deuterium oxide (“heavy water”) that slows down neutrons produced in fission without absorbing too many to allow the chain reaction to continue—can be fueled with natural uranium. Reactors moderated with ordinary water (“light water”), however, require uranium enriched to more than 2 percent U235 to function. (The higher the enrichment, the smaller the volume of fuel a reactor requires.) Nuclear weapons, which produce an uncontrolled fast-neutron chain reaction, use either uranium enriched to at least 90 percent U235—HEU—or plutonium. Enrichment (for uranium) or breeding in a nuclear reactor (for plutonium) thus represent alternative paths to a bomb.

  * The “half-life” of a radioactive element is the time required for half a given quantity of the material to undergo radioactive decay, a natural process; the shorter the half-life, the more intense the radiation.

  * Glass-fiber technology adapted to use carbon fiber would allow Iraq to manufacture advanced centrifuges for uranium enrichment.

  TWO CUTTING SADDAM’S SINEWS

  GEORGE H. W. BUSH had been shocked by Saddam Hussein’s perfidy in the run-up to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait at the beginning of August 1990. The invasion itself stunned and then outraged him. The United States had bent over backward to mollify the Iraqi dictator; bitterly, his response was betrayal. On 2 August the United Nations Security Council condemned the invasion and demanded that Iraq withdraw. Iraqi tanks continued to roll into Kuwait through the weekend, and when Bush helicoptered back from Camp David on Sunday, 5 August, he announced emotionally from the White House lawn, “This will not stand,1 this aggression against Kuwait.” James Baker says he reminded the president later that month, when the two old friends were alone in the Oval Office, “I know you’re aware2 of the fact that this has all the ingredients that brought down three of the last five Presidents: a hostage crisis, body bags and a full-fledged economic recession caused by forty-dollar oil.” According to Baker, Bush responded, “I know that, Jimmy, I know that. But we’re doing what’s right; we’re doing what is clearly in the national interest of the United States. Whatever else happens, so be it.”

  Several thousand Americans had been trapped in Kuwait and Iraq by the invasion. In the weeks and months to come, the primary responsibility for protecting them and securing their release fell to a forty-year-old U.S. foreign service professional named Joseph Wilson. Joe Wilson’s conflict a decade later with the administration of Bush’s son George W. Bush about whether or not Iraq had recently attempted to buy yellowcake from Niger would make his name and that of his second wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, well known. For now, his challenge was representing the hundred Americans who had taken shelter in the American embassy in Kuwait City and the several thousand more who were lying low throughout the city. At the same time, he would work to gather up a large contingent in Baghdad, mostly employees of Bechtel, the American engineering company, and to free the hundred-plus hostages whom the Iraqis had seized.

  Wilson met with Saddam3 himself on 6 August. “Convey to President Bush4 that he should regard the Kuwaiti emir and crown prince as history,” the Iraqi dictator vaunted. He used the occasion to offer America a supply of cheap oil in exchange for its tolerance of his taking over what he liked to call Iraq’s “nineteenth province.” (He announced the annexation of Kuwait two days later.) He also fished for clues about the United States’s intentions. Wilson didn’t know those intentions, he writes, but after their discussion the dictator was visibly relieved. “Saddam was worried5 about the possible American response, and may have concluded that the confusing statements coming from different parts of the U.S. government meant there would be no consensus to respond militarily to his invasion of Kuwait.”

  While Wilson was meeting with Saddam in Baghdad, secretary of defense Richard Cheney was meeting with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia in Jedda. Among others accompanying him on his mission to convince the Saudi king to allow the United States to use his country as a base of operations were Norman Schwarzkopf, the American Army general in charge of the U.S. Central Command; Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates; and Cheney’s senior aide Paul Wolfowitz. Schwarzkopf delivered the main briefing, using satellite photos of the Iraqi buildup along Kuwait’s border with Saudi Arabia to support his argument. Cheney closed the sale. The king recognized the looming threat to his country and was easily persuaded6 despite the skepticism of Crown Prince Abdullah and other advisers on hand. “After the danger is over,”7 Cheney concluded, “our forces will go home.” In Arabic, Abdullah quipped acidly, “I should hope so.” At 3:30 p.m. that day, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, recalled, “Dick Cheney called me8 from Jedda. He had just left King Fahd, he said. ‘We’ve got his approval. I’ve i
nformed the President. Start issuing orders to move the force.’” The first U.S. muscle—a squadron of F-15 Eagles—arrived in Saudi Arabia the next day. By mid-August, Powell had airlifted almost thirty thousand combat troops into the country. “Within a couple of weeks9 we’ll have completed the deterrent buildup,” he told Bush. “We should have enough power to discourage Saddam from attacking, if that’s what he has in mind.”

  ON 2 AUGUST, the second day of the Iraqi invasion, Norman Schwarzkopf had mused aloud that his science adviser should investigate the feasibility of exploding a nuclear weapon in a high-altitude airburst over Iraq at the outset of a war to generate an electromagnetic pulse to short out Iraqi communications and missile launch controls. The Joint Chiefs would soon decide not to move nuclear weapons into the Persian Gulf, writes the intelligence analyst William Arkin—in any case, there were nuclear bombs stored at an American air base in southern Turkey, well within range of Baghdad—“but a variety of military10 organizations quietly began to examine nuclear options. Led by the ‘special weapons branch’ in the Operations Directorate and the office of the Scientific Advisor at Schwarzkopf’s headquarters, the Army staff, Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA), Strategic Air Command (SAC) and the Department of Energy’s national laboratories all contributed ideas and proposals.”

  Unknown to anyone outside the Iraqi government, Saddam was also examining what he imagined to be his nuclear options. In the days after the invasion, through his cousin and son-in-law Hussein Kamel, he ordered his scientists to initiate an eight-month crash program to build an atomic bomb. They could divert the 93-percent-enriched uranium left unloaded when Israel bombed the French-built reactor at Tuwaitha and the 80-percent-enriched fuel in the Soviet reactor as well. Allowing for processing losses, that would not be enough for one bomb,11 so they would somehow have to enrich a few more kilograms from their reactor supplies. The goal of the crash program was to produce a total of twenty kilograms12 of weapons-grade uranium metal to serve as the pit of an implosion warhead that could be mounted on a missile capable of reaching Tel Aviv13—a mission of national suicide considering Israel’s certain nuclear response.

  The previous May, Kamel’s scientists had completed a series of twenty high-explosive tests evaluating five different designs for an implosion lens system. The high-explosive components of the Nagasaki implosion bomb, Fat Man, had been made from an explosive called RDX; that bomb had weighed five tons. The Iraqi design used HMX—“high-melting explosive,” a more powerful RDX derivative—and was much lighter. “These tests were credited14 with reducing the bomb weight to about half a ton,” a U.S. Defense Special Weapons Agency report concludes. At a thousand pounds, the weapon could be delivered by either one of Iraq’s larger, longer-range missiles15 (the Aabed or the Tamuz), although it would require advanced engineering to stabilize it against the large g-forces of missile acceleration and reentry. A less sophisticated assembly could be delivered by bomber. With some eighteen kilograms of HEU packed into its core, the bomb would be notably unstable,16 barely subcritical, and ready to go off. “It was a stupid idea,”17 writes a knowledgeable former U.S. official, “because they would have to master several chemistry steps never before tried in Iraq to get the [uranium oxide] reactor fuel turned into metal, and they would have to suddenly succeed at centrifuge enrichment when they were already having lots of problems. The only advantage would have been that the amount needed, with the already enriched reactor fuel on hand, would have been much smaller [than a gun bomb would require]. Otherwise, it was a knee-jerk project, the dictates of a mad dictator.”

  At the end of August Saddam announced that the women and children among the U.S. refugees would be allowed to leave Kuwait. With all Western airlines banned, Wilson and his staff had to ticket the exodus on Iraq Air. September saw two or three flights a week out of Kuwait via Baghdad. Hostages had increased by then to about 125, Wilson recalls:

  We had learned that they18 were routinely being moved from one strategic site to another inside Iraq. As some were released they brought purloined letters from others to us, so that after a while we were able to identify some fifty-five sites that were being used around the country. We sent this information to Pentagon planners for their use.

  As it turned out, Saddam had unwittingly shown us, by where he put the hostages, which locations were most important to him. I was gratified when several months later, on the first night of Desert Storm, long after the hostages had been released, many of those sites were ones hit by American bombs.

  Bush initially condemned the Iraqi invasion with inflated analogies to Hitler and the Second World War. “A half-century ago19 our nation and the world paid dearly for appeasing an aggressor who should and could have been stopped,” the president told a crowd in mid-August. “We’re not about to make that same mistake twice. Today Saddam Hussein’s Iraq has been cut off by the Arab and Islamic nations that surround it. The Arab League itself has condemned Iraq’s aggression. We stand with them, and we are not alone.”

  Whether the U.S. should stand with other countries through the United Nations or challenge Iraq alone was becoming a matter of debate within the administration at that time. The political analyst Christian Alfonsi has identified “sharp divisions within George20 Bush’s war cabinet over what the U.N.’s role in the Gulf crisis should be. It had become apparent to [U.N. Ambassador Thomas] Pickering that Dick Cheney and the Pentagon ‘really didn’t want to stay with the UN activity. They basically wanted to free themselves from the need to consult with anyone.’ … [But] Bush intuitively sensed the widespread suspicion of American motives in the Islamic world and wanted to build a broad international coalition against Iraq that included significant participation by other Arab and Islamic states. For this, the legitimacy conferred by the UN was essential.”

  A second strategic debate went on within the Bush administration over whether and how long to allow sanctions and diplomacy to continue before going to war. Baker supported diplomacy because it strengthened the burgeoning new partnership between the Soviet Union and the United States. Scowcroft, on the other hand, writes Alfonsi, “was convinced that military21 action in the Gulf would become inevitable, and not just because he doubted that sanctions and diplomacy alone would be enough to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. The United States needed to demonstrate a willingness to use force against Iraq, so that future challengers to American global leadership would think twice before acting.” Scowcroft, that is, wanted to make an example of Iraq to scare away potential competitors in the new world that was opening to American hegemony with the withdrawal and weakening of the Soviet Union.

  Bush’s longer-term problem was what to do about Iraq after his coalition drove the invaders out of Kuwait. The Middle Eastern dictatorship would still be a formidable military power, the fourth largest in the world. The solution, devised by Thomas Pickering,22 was to leave Saddam in authority but to shrink Iraq’s military, destroy most of its arms, wall off sections of the country with exclusionary zones, and eliminate its weapons of mass destruction. Cutting Saddam’s sinews to that extent went beyond what was required for liberating its tiny neighbor, however, and required a larger rationale. “The Bush administration,”23 Alfonsi writes, “which had rarely mentioned Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in its public (or private) comments during the first month of the Gulf crisis, would now increasingly use Saddam Hussein’s attempts to acquire these weapons as justification for taking decisive action against Iraq.” At that time, however, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s David Kay, “the consensus opinion24 of the intelligence agencies and all was there was nothing there.”

  So one consequence of these internal Bush administration policy debates was to endorse fear-mongering as an acceptable stratagem to sell the American people on war in the Gulf, as it had been an acceptable stratagem for building and sustaining an economically burdensome U.S. military-industrial complex during the long Cold War with the Soviet Union. Bush believed, correctly, that the Gulf conflict
was the first post–Cold War challenge to world order, historically significant and precedent-setting. Tragically, choosing to lie about the known extent of Iraq’s nuclear capabilities set a dangerous precedent; what Bush did with the best of intentions in 1990 would be available to be repeated with less justified intentions a decade later by his son.

  AT THE BEGINNING OF October 1990, a representative of the Pakistani metallurgist A. Q. Khan turned up in Baghdad with a sensational offer: Khan, the so-called father of the Pakistani bomb, was prepared to sell the Iraqis a tested bomb design and support for centrifuge enrichment of uranium. The unspecified bomb design was the Pakistani derivative of the Chinese design25 designated CHIC-4, which was passed to Pakistan in the 1980s, when China under Deng Xiaoping was intentionally proliferating nuclear-weapons technology to the developing world; Pakistan had tested its version of CHIC-4 in China at the Lop Nur test site the previous May. Khan wanted a preliminary technical meeting with Iraqi experts to review the documents he was prepared to sell. He wanted $5 million up front and a 10 percent commission on any machines or materials the Iraqis bought. His motive, an Iraqi intelligence report judged bluntly, was “gaining profits26 for him and the intermediary.”

  Hussein Kamel’s people were wary of the offer. They suspected that it might be an American sting. They asked Iraqi intelligence—the Mukhabarat—to acquire samples of the materials Khan was offering to sell. The Mukhabarat passed the request along to the intermediary, but it was never fulfilled. The public records of the Khan approach are too scanty to determine why. Khan did sell the Iraqis a chain-reaction-initiation system more sophisticated than the World War II–era polonium-beryllium initiator developed at Los Alamos that the indigenous Iraqi design used. Had the Iraqis bought the Pakistani design, it’s barely conceivable that they might have been able to piece together enough enriched uranium to make one bomb. Their suspicions got in the way, and soon enough American conventional bombs obliterated their nuclear installations.