'Atoms for Peace' by U.S. gave nuclear key to Iraq

After hunting for days, the Iraqi physicist finally checked a long-locked attic room. There he spotted a box, coated with decades of dust, and opened it. Sure enough, it was full of reams of data -- American data -- on how to make a nuclear bomb.

"In it were the Manhattan Project books and reports," Imad Khadduri recalls, referring to the U.S. program that produced America's first atomic weapons during World War II.

With that and other U.S. material, Khadduri and his colleagues in 1987 painstakingly began collecting patent designs for critical equipment. "Within four months," he says, "the scientists and engineers had their hands full of immediately applicable scientific information. ... They quickly set to work."

With that, too, Iraq joined the list of countries whose bomb programs stemmed in part from the U.S. "Atoms for Peace" initiative, inaugurated by President Eisenhower 50 years ago this month with a historic speech at the United Nations.

Atoms for Peace was designed to sell U.S. nuclear technology for electricity generation and other peaceful purposes, but it had "an unintended outcome," says Peter R. Lavoy, an American expert on weapons proliferation. "Some recipient nations did divert U.S. nuclear assistance to military uses."

In Iraq's case, the 1991 Gulf War halted the weapons program, and U.N. inspectors later dismantled what was left of it. The Bush administration claimed before the U.S. invasion last March that intelligence indicated Iraq had restarted a bomb program, but months of searching turned up no evidence of that.

Khadduri, a senior scientist in the Iraqi bomb effort who left his homeland in 1998, describes the quest for technology in a new, self-published book, "Iraq's Nuclear Mirage," available via online booksellers.

When Iraq mounted a crash program in 1987 to build a bomb, he was named to coordinate scientific documentation. At the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission library at Tuwaitha, south of Baghdad, he determined the government had received U.S. reference material as an Atoms for Peace gift in 1956, when Iraq was a British-allied monarchy.

Card indexes indicated the material included some 30 Manhattan Project books and reports, but didn't say where they were.

"It took me several days of searching for the keys of forgotten attics and storage rooms in the library building," he recounts. "In one of them I found a box that was probably not opened since the 1960s."

It held the Manhattan Project material. Khadduri then found more U.S. documents in other locations.

The Iraqi physicists focused on the calutron, a device for separating out fissionable uranium for reactor fuel -- or bombs -- by using electromagnetic isotope separation, an American technique of the 1940s that later bombmakers disdained.

"We were the only people who made use of the calutron, as far as I know. It was a huge exercise, using huge amounts of electricity," Khadduri said in a telephone interview from Toronto, where he lives.

Key to the exercise were 164 patents relating to the calutron, noted in references in the literature. Khadduri didn't have the designs themselves, but he knew where to find them.

Enlisting an Iraqi diplomat's help, he tapped the resources of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, repository of all world patents.

"He used Iraqi students in Geneva," Khadduri said of his partner. "I would send him a list of 20 or 30 items, with a couple of calutron patents thrown in, and the students would go by WIPO and collect them."

They soon accumulated all the patents, including equipment designs down to minute details, and Iraqi teams built their own calutrons, dubbed "Baghdadtrons," at Tarmiya, north of Baghdad. The work was difficult, but they were slowly producing bomb material until Tarmiya was bombed in the 1991 war.

In his Atoms for Peace speech on Dec. 8, 1953, Eisenhower said he hoped to "hasten the day when fear of the atom will begin to disappear."

The underlying U.S. goal was to head off a commercial and propaganda challenge from the Soviet Union's nuclear establishment. By 1954, the United States was training foreigners in nuclear science and had declassified hundreds of nuclear studies. In 1955 in Geneva, a U.S.-sponsored conference on peaceful nuclear energy drew 25,000 participants and distributed truckloads of declassified material.

Lavoy, a specialist at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, said the optimism finally died in 1974, when India, which had trained more than 1,000 nuclear scientists in the United States, conducted a nuclear test explosion.

In an article in the journal Arms Control Today, Lavoy also noted what he said was the positive side of Atoms for Peace, including its role in the establishment of the U.N.-affiliated International Atomic Energy Agency, which works to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

In his memoir, Khadduri recalls that Iraq's Atoms for Peace gift package was to have included a small U.S. nuclear research reactor. But the Iraqi socialist revolution of 1958 intervened, and the reactor was diverted to Iran, then a U.S. friend -- and now a focus of U.S. concern about possible nuclear weapons-making.

That reactor is believed still operating, after helping train generations of Iranian physicists.