Page:Iraqdossier.djvu/16

 2,850 tonnes of mustard gas, 210 tonnes of tabun, 795 tonnes of sarin and cyclosarin, and 3.9 tonnes of VX. Iraq’s nuclear programme was established under the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s. Under a nuclear co-operation agreement signed with the Soviet Union in 1959, a nuclear research centre, equipped with a research reactor, was built at Tuwaitha, the main Iraqi nuclear research centre. The research reactor worked up to 1991. The surge in Iraqi oil revenues in the early 1970s supported an expansion of the research programme. This was bolstered in the mid-1970s by the acquisition of two research reactors powered by highly enriched uranium fuel and equipment for fuel fabrication and handling. By the end of 1984 Iraq was self-sufficient in uranium ore. One of the reactors was destroyed in an Israeli air attack in June 1981 shortly before it was to become operational; the other was never completed. By the mid-1980s the deterioration of Iraq’s position in the war with Iran prompted renewed interest in the military use of nuclear technology. Additional resources were put into developing technologies to enrich uranium as fissile material (material that makes up the core of a nuclear weapon) for use in nuclear weapons. Enriched uranium was preferred because it could be more easily produced covertly than the alternative, plutonium. Iraq followed parallel programmes to produce highly enriched uranium (HEU), electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS) and gas centrifuge enrichment. By 1991 one EMIS enrichment facility was nearing completion and another was under construction. However, Iraq never succeeded in its EMIS technology and the programme had been dropped by 1991. Iraq decided to concentrate on gas centrifuges as the means for producing the necessary fissile material. Centrifuge facilities were also under construction, but the centrifuge design was still being developed. In August 1990 Iraq instigated a crash programme to develop a single nuclear weapon within a year. This programme envisaged the rapid development of a small 50 machine gas centrifuge cascade to produce weapons-grade HEU using fuel from the Soviet research reactor, which was already substantially enriched, and unused fuel from the reactor bombed by the Israelis. By the time of the Gulf War, the crash programme had made little progress. Iraq’s declared aim was to produce a missile warhead with a 20-kiloton yield and weapons designs were produced for the simplest implosion weapons. These were similar to the device used at Nagasaki in 1945. Iraq was also working on more Rh