The Bomb in My Garden

Kurt Pitzer, Mahdi Obeidi

Description

Acclaim for the Bomb in My Garden

"This one book will tell you more about Iraq's quest for weapons of mass destruction than all U.S. intelligence on the subject. It is a fascinating and rare glimpse inside Saddam Hussein's Iraq—and inside a tyrant's mind."
—Fareed Zakaria, author of The Future of Freedom

"The Bomb in My Garden is important and utterly gripping. The old cliché is true—you start reading, and you don't want to stop. Mahdi Obeidi's story makes clear how hard Saddam Hussein tried to develop a nuclear weapon, and the reasons he fell short. It is also unforgettable as a picture of how honorable people tried to cope with a despot's demands. I enthusiastically recommend this book."
—James Fallows, National Correspondent, The Atlantic Monthly

"One of the three or four accounts that anyone remotely interested in the Iraq debate will simply have to read. Apart from its insight into the workings of the Saddam nuclear project, it provides a haunting account of the atmosphere of sheer evil that permeated every crevice of Iraqi life under the old regime."
—christopher hitchens, Slate

"Mahdi Obeidi describes in jaw-dropping detail how Iraq acquired the means to produce highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient to building a nuclear weapon, by the eve of the first Gulf War. . . . [His book] offers insights into how a determined dictator, backed by sufficient resources, can come within reach of acquiring the world's most horrific weapons."
—The Washington Post BookWorld
Preface.

1. The Bomb in My Garden.

2. Early Ambitions.

3. The Centrifuge.

4. Saddam's Grip.

5. Shopping Europe.

6. The Crash Program.

7. Nuclear Hide-and-Seek.

8. The Dark Years.

9. The March to War.

10. The Time Capsule.

Epilogue.

Acknowledgments.

Index.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Iraq
• Iraq War
• Military
• Middle East
• Saddam Hussein
• Saddam
• History
• Irak

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 02 mai 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780470353714
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Bomb in My Garden
The Bomb in My Garden
The Secrets of Saddam s Nuclear Mastermind
MAHDI OBEIDI AND KURT PITZER

John Wiley Sons, Inc.
Copyright 2004 by Mahdi Obeidi and Kurt Pitzer. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
Design and composition by Navta Associates, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Obeidi, Mahdi, 1944-
The bomb in my garden : the secrets of Saddam s nuclear mastermind / by Mahdi Obeidi and Kurt Pitzer.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-471-67965-8
1. Nuclear weapons-Iraq. 2. Obeidi, Mahdi, 1944- 3. Nuclear physicists-Iraq-Biography. 4. Nuclear nonproliferation I. Pitzer, Kurt. II. Title.
UA853.I75O24 2004
956.7044 092-dc22
2004015415
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is dedicated to Layla, Isra a, Zaid, Amne, and Ayat Obeidi-for enduring years of hardship with strength and love.
CONTENTS
Preface
1. The Bomb in My Garden
2. Early Ambitions
3. The Centrifuge
4. Saddam s Grip
5. Shopping in Europe
6. The Crash Program
7. Nuclear Hide-and-Seek
8. The Dark Years
9. The March to War
10. The Time Capsule
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Index
PREFACE
O n February 5, 2003, as American troops massed in Kuwait to prepare for the invasion of Iraq, my family and I sat in our living room in Baghdad to watch U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell s presentation to the United Nations Security Council, in which he was to give evidence that Iraq was still developing weapons of mass destruction. We had postponed our evening meal to watch the speech live from New York, where it was morning. The five of us crowded anxiously around our widescreen television set I had rigged to an illegal satellite dish on our roof. We were acutely aware that the threat of war hung in the balance and that this was a critical moment in the histories of both Iraq and the United States.
We tuned in to the Arabic-language news channel Al-Jazeera for the benefit of my wife and children, but having been educated in the United States and Britain I could understand the original words in English beneath the translation. Powell, wearing an elegant diplomat s suit, sat behind the wooden desk in the UN chamber and began presenting evidence on an overhead monitor.
His arguments sounded cool-headed and rational, with none of the flowery jargon typical of speeches in Saddam s Iraq, and his tone appealed to the scientist in me. When he came to the nuclear issue, I sat on the edge of the sofa and leaned forward to catch every word. As the creator and director of Saddam s former nuclear centrifuge program, I was one of a very few people who knew the truth about the some of the allegations he would make.
The United States, he said, suspected that Iraq planned to manufacture high-quality magnets for use in centrifuges that would enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. For weeks UN weapons inspectors had been asking about an Iraqi magnet factory, which was still in the conceptual stage. I had overseen the financial plans for the facility, and had recently helped try to convince weapons inspectors that it was designed to manufacture magnets for peaceful purposes-and not centrifuges.
Powell s second point was one to which the UN inspectors had given special emphasis. Iraq had ordered thousands of high-grade aluminum tubes to be used for artillery rockets, which allegedly could also be used in a centrifuge program. Pictures of the confiscated tubes flashed on a screen for the Security Council and the rest of the world to see. Weapons inspectors in Iraq asked about these tubes repeatedly. We even tried to explain our case to a separate team from South Africa s former nuclear program. I knew these tubes were not intended for centrifuges. Aluminum is a much lower-grade material than the carbon fiber or top-quality steel we had worked with more than twelve years earlier. Also, the diameter of the tubes in question was about half the diameter of those we had used throughout our centrifuge program. From an engineering standpoint, their specifications would have required us to start almost from scratch. I thought back to our struggles to acquire tubes appropriate for centrifuges during the late 1980s and, knowing what I did, how unreasonable it was to think that these aluminum tubes could be part of a revived Iraqi nuclear weapons program.
But Powell sounded so sure of himself that I felt almost tempted to believe his credible-sounding arguments. Sitting there on my sofa, I asked myself the same question that had bothered me ever since the UN inspectors had come to Iraq with fresh accusations several months earlier: Could Saddam have restarted a nuclear program and kept me out of the loop? Were the inspectors about to discover a centrifuge facility that had been hidden from me? No, I realized again, it simply wasn t possible. I had built the centrifuge program from the ground up, and I saw it dismantled by the UN weapons inspectors after the 1991 Gulf War. I had been the linchpin of Saddam s effort to conceal it from inspectors, who had destroyed much of our equipment in Iraq and carted off the rest during the 1990s. By the end of that decade the only elements of the nuclear centrifuge program still hidden-the complete set of designs and a few prototype components-were buried in our garden just a few feet from our living room, unbeknownst even to my family, let alone the rest of the world. Saddam simply couldn t have reconstituted this program without my participation, or at least my knowledge.
After dinner my family and I went outside to sit in our garden, where we felt that we were farther from Saddam s bugging devices and therefore freer to speak our minds. War seemed unavoidable now. Iraq s insistence that the country had no weapons of mass destruction fell on deaf ears. Saddam had always hungered for a nuclear bomb, and few in the West could believe that he was not secretly trying to develop one. He had continued to break international rules, building missiles with ranges that slightly exceeded limits set by the UN and unmanned aircraft that could travel deep into neighboring countries. Now the mistrust between Saddam and, especially, the United States and Great Britain, had led to a point of no return. Although we could be punished with death for saying so, my wife and children and I were sure that Saddam s track record doomed Iraq to invasion.
In many ways Saddam was himself a weapon of mass destruction. He had invaded two neighboring countries, killed thousands of Iraqis and Iranians with chemical weapons, tortured and terrorized his own people, and buried many of his victims in mass graves. For years his erratic behavior had proven just how delusional and sinister he was. The idea that he might one day surprise the world with a nuclear bomb was a powerful nightmare.
I knew Saddam s entire regime was based on deception. I also knew how close he had come to actually getting the bomb; I had been caught in the very center of this story. During the late 1980s, spurred on by his threats and bullying tactics, I went undercover to many institutions and companies in the United States and Europe that possessed the intricate knowledge we needed to build centrifuges. I exploited a sprawling international black market for materials and technical assistance, successfully disguising our project by scattering our efforts around the globe. By the outbreak of the 1991 Gulf War, we had succeeded in a key step toward enriching uranium for an Iraqi nuclear bomb. The world came frighteningly close to finding out what Saddam might do with one.
During the 1990s, Saddam hid my identity from UN weapons inspectors for as long as possible, presumably in the belief that it would be easier to restart the centrifuge program if my role was not compromised. By the end of the decade, however, the Iraqi nuclear program was little more than a memory. As the world speculated about whet