Prior to the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq possessed a vast nuclear infrastructure. Iraq's nuclear programs, although spanning the entire fuel cycle, were devoted to Saddam Hussein's single-minded pursuit of nuclear weapons. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Iraq established 10 major nuclear installations and utilized more than 20 factories and state industrial establishments for manufacturing equipment and materials necessary to the nuclear effort. Most of these facilities were located within a 70km radius of Baghdad, with the exceptions of the EMIS enrichment facility at Ash Sharkat, and the uranium mining and recovery plants of Akashat, Al Qaim, and Al Jesira.

Prior to 1992, there were two principal organizations that were responsible for the development of the nuclear weapons program. The first group was the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), which was chaired by Saddam Hussein, a fact that was never disclosed to the IAEA until after the 1991 Gulf War.[1] Headquartered at the Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, the IAEC consisted primarily of Saddam's top nuclear scientists and loyal technicians who oversaw the day-to-day research, development, and operation of Iraq's nuclear facilities.

The second and more prominent organization involved in overseeing the development of nuclear facilities was the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization (MIMI). Throughout the 1980s, this extremely powerful entity, led by Saddam Hussein's son-in-law Hussein Kamil, was responsible for an elaborate scheme using state civilian establishments as fronts for procuring equipment necessary for Iraq's nuclear weapons program. MIMI used commercial ventures such as dam building, fertilizer plant construction, and petrochemical plants for purchasing defense-related items. Examples of MIMI fronts included the Badush Dam construction program, which was used in procurement for the BADR-2000 ballistic missile program, and Petrochemical Complex 2 (PC-2), which masked an effort to construct a "super gun" capable of firing artillery shells hundreds of kilometers. MIMI's code name for the secret nuclear weapons program was Petrochemical Complex 3 or PC-3. Designated sub-projects within PC-3 were tasked with various responsibilities including procurement of advanced CNC machine tools, centrifuge research and manufacturing, and purchasing graphite sheets used in the EMIS enrichment process. At the height of Iraq's nuclear weapons program in the late 1980s, it is estimated that the combined manpower of the IAEC and PC-3 organizations was approximately 7,000 people.[2]

Iraq's primary centers of nuclear activity were the Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center and the Al Atheer Nuclear Weapons Complex. The Al Tuwaitha facility, situated 30km south of Baghdad along the Tigris River, was home to all of Iraq's research reactors including the 5MW IRT-5000, the 40MW Tammuz-1 (also known as the Osiraq reactor, which was destroyed by an Israeli air strike on 7 June 1981), and the 500kW Tammuz-2 (a.k.a. Isis) reactors. The Al Tuwaitha installation also housed a fuel fabrication complex, a spent fuel reprocessing facility, waste storage sites, and numerous buildings and laboratories aimed at developing uranium enrichment technologies.

The Al Atheer Nuclear Weapons Complex, located 68km southwest of Baghdad, was a clandestine facility committed to the weaponization of a nuclear device, an effort that violated Iraq's legal commitments under the NPT to not develop nuclear weapons. This facility conducted research on uranium metallurgy, high-explosive lenses, and the necessary electronic firing systems required for detonation. Most of the research focused on an implosion-type bomb design, although work on a gun-type design, similar to that used on Hiroshima, may have taken place.[3]

One of the most striking features of the Iraqi nuclear effort was their commitment to enrichment technologies. It is estimated that Iraq spent from $5 to 10 billion exploring a number of uranium enrichment processes.[4] Ultimately, Iraq settled on electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS) as the program's primary enrichment technique. In addition to Al Tuwaitha, the primary facilities conducting EMIS work included the Al Tarmiya installation and its identical twin facility, Ash Sharkat. The vast amounts of electrical power required by the EMIS process were provided by an electrical substation, with underground power lines designed to mask the amount of electricity consumed at Al Tarmiya.[5] UN weapons inspectors concluded that if completed, Al Tarmiya's EMIS system could have produced 15kg of highly enriched uranium (HEU) annually.[6] Iraq originally declared the Ash Sharkat facility to be a plastics-coating plant. However, IAEA inspections revealed this facility was an exact duplicate of the Al Tarmiya EMIS facility.[7]

Significant advances in gas centrifuge technology took place at the Rashdiya and Al Furat facilities. Utilizing centrifuge designs obtained from German companies, these facilities were able to successfully validate the gaseous centrifuge enrichment process. Other enrichment technologies pursued included gaseous diffusion, molecular and atomic vapor laser isotope separation (MLIS/AVLIS), ion exchange, and chemical processes.

Saddam Hussein—possibly in conjunction with Baath Party technocrats who oversaw the nuclear program—made relatively uneducated technological decisions that resulted in vast sums of money being spent on the unsuccessful pursuit of numerous enrichment technologies. As Dr. Hussein al-Shahristani, one of the founders of Iraq's nuclear research program and close advisor to Saddam Hussien, put it, Saddam's "sense of hollow greatness or rather inflated ego has prompted his involvement in matters he is completely ignorant of. For example, he used to settle dialogues on nuclear issues of which he knew nothing by a mere scribble of a pen or a funny spontaneous decision on most occasions."[8]

Today, there is no open source evidence to indicate that Iraq possesses the facilities necessary to produce fissile material. However, it is possible that clandestine facilities may exist or be under development in Iraq. Although much of Iraq's nuclear infrastructure was destroyed or severely impaired by the coalition air strikes in 1991, Saddam Hussein continued his clandestine pursuit of nuclear weapons, employing as many as 2,000 nuclear weapons-dedicated engineers and physicists at least into the mid-1990s.[9] Given these human and technical resource, Western security experts feared that if Saddam were able to acquire enough fissile material on the black market, he could produce a nuclear weapon in a matter of months.[10] This in fact was one of the justifications for the US military invasion of Iraq that took place on 20 March 2003. Given the US commitment to removing the Saddam Hussein regime and disarming the country of weapons of mass destruction, it is extremely unlikely that Iraq will be able to reconstitute nuclear weapons facilities in the foreseeable future.

Key Sources:
[1] David Albright, Corey Gay, and Khidhir Hamza, "Development of the Al-Tuwaitha Site: What if the Public or the IAEA Had Overhead Imagery?" Institute for Science and International Security, 26 April 1999, <http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iraq/tuwaitha.html>.
[2] "Projects Managed by the Iraqi Nuclear Weapons Program Known as PC-3," Federation of American Scientists Central Intelligence Agency Gulflink Collection, August 1991, <http://www.fas.org/irp/gulf/cia/960424/
65819_01.htm>.
[3] Avner Cohen and Marvin Miller, "Iraq and the Rules of the Nuclear Game," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 47, No. 6, July/August 1991.
[4] "Pickering Testifies on Gulf Cease-Fire Implementation," Statement by Thomas Pickering, US Ambassador to the UN, in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, 18 July 1991, <http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1991/910718-190813.htm>.
[5] Report on the 13th IAEA On-Site Inspection in Iraq under Resolution 687, UN Doc S/24450, 16 August 1992, <http://www.iaea.or.at/worldatom/Programmes/ActionTeam/
reports/s_24450.pdf>; David Albright, "Iraq's Program to Make Highly Enriched Uranium and Plutonium for Nuclear Weapons Prior to the Gulf War," ISIS, October 2002, <http://www.isis-online.org/publications/iraq/
iraqs_fm_history.html>.
[6] Report on the Fourth IAEA On-Site Inspection in Iraq under Security Council Resolution 687 (1991), UN Doc S/22986, 28 August 1991, <http://www.iaea.or.at/worldatom/Programmes/ActionTeam/
reports/S_22986.pdf>.
[7] Report on the Third On-site Inspection in Iraq under Security Council Resolution 687 (1991), UN Doc S/22837, 25 July 1991, <http://www.iaea.or.at/worldatom/Programmes/ActionTeam/
reports/S_22837.pdf>.
[8] Ghalib Darwish, "Interview with Iraqi Nuclear Scientist," Al-Majallah (London), 8 January 1996, in FBIS Document FTS19960208000746, 8 January 1996.
[9] Khidhir Hamza with Jeff Stein, Saddam's Bombmaker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda, New York, NY: Scribner Press, 2000, 333.
[10] Dr. John Chipman, "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Net Assessment," IISS Strategic Dossier, 9 September 2002.

	Updated November 2003