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BOOK
REVIEW
Hunting deadly treasure in
Iraq
The Bomb in My
Garden: The Secrets of Saddam's Nuclear
Mastermind, by Mahdi Obeidi and
Kurt Pitzer
Reviewed by Gary
LaMoshi
(See also interview
with Mahdi Obeidi)
Saddam Hussein's Iraq
enriched uranium using a secret centrifuge program
built with technology and components acquired
discreetly, often illegally, from 
overseas. The
program brought Iraq to the threshold of creating
nuclear weapons.
The year of this
breakthrough was 1990, and the centrifuge project
never progressed from experimental success to the
production stage. The crash program rose from the
ashes of Israel's "anticipatory self-defense"
strike on Iraq's Tammuz nuclear reactor in 1981,
days before the plant went into operation. That
raid destroyed the 40-megawatt reactor with
legitimate scientific purposes and that would have
produced partially enriched uranium. During the
Iran-Iraq War and in the prelude to the first Gulf
War, Saddam's regime accelerated its drive to join
the nuclear club.
The key challenge facing
Iraq, and other nuclear-weapons aspirants, was
obtaining weapons-grade fissionable material,
uranium or plutonium. Mahdi Obeidi, the engineer
in charge of Iraq's nuclear enrichment program,
reveals in his new book how Iraq pursued its
nuclear ambitions, and how the program lay
dormant, symbolized by the centrifuge secrets
buried in Obeidi's garden in Baghdad, for more
than a decade.
The title of Obeidi's book,
The Bomb in My Garden, is a black-comedic
pun. It signifies the centrifuge components and
design plans hidden beneath the shade of Obeidi's
lotus tree. The title also refers more explicitly
to the bomb that crashed into his back-yard
toolshed, a few feet short of his lotus tree and
his daughters' bedroom, during the US siege of
Baghdad in 2003. That bomb, which failed to
detonate, began Obeidi's drama with the US
occupying forces.
After the fall of Saddam
Hussein, Obeidi wanted to turn over his hidden
secrets to the victors. Already well known to
weapons inspectors, he feared arrest by the US
forces as well as reprisals from the remnants of
Saddam's regime if they discovered he'd contacted
the occupying forces. Obeidi tried to approach US
authorities in Iraq in the days following the fall
of Baghdad but encountered chaos. In desperation,
he reached former US weapons inspector David
Albright in Washington via a reporter's satellite
phone - the local phone system had been destroyed
- and began back-channel negotiations to
relinquish the centrifuge-program remnants, avoid
prison, and ensure his family's safety.
This ballet of clandestine meetings with
intelligence agents, identified by first names
only, seemed to be succeeding until troops burst
into Obeidi's home (through his garden) one
morning, forcing his family to lie belly down on
the living room floor. The soldiers handcuffed
Obeidi, still in his pajamas, and hauled the
engineer to a makeshift prison at the Baghdad
airport. Within hours, a US officer apologized and
delivered Obeidi back home to his astonished
family. Finally, in June 2003, Obeidi and his
family left Iraq for Kuwait and resettled in an
undisclosed location in the United States, a happy
ending.
The bulk of The Bomb in My
Garden covers Obeidi's work during the 1980s,
after the bombing of Tammuz, to find alternative
means to obtain enriched uranium. Educated at the
Colorado School of Mines in the US as a petroleum
engineer, then dispatched for a PhD in materials
engineering at University College of Swansea in
Wales, Obeidi joined the Iraqi Atomic Energy
Commission, an organization that offered the more
formidable scientific challenge of nuclear
research. The book explains the technology behind
the bomb-building program in terms for general
readers. For years, Obeidi let his scientist's
curiosity blind him to the consequences of giving
Saddam Hussein a nuclear option.
Fear also
contributed to Obeidi's dedication to the
nuclear-weapons project. He describes the terror
under Saddam - Obeidi calls him Iraq's real
"weapon of mass destruction" - where scientists
received orders they could not refuse with
deadlines in weeks for projects that would
normally take years. Obeidi retreated to his
garden to escape suspected bugging devices in his
house, saying he even feared speaking frankly to
his wife.
Obeidi also notes that economic
sanctions after the Gulf War had made most Iraqis
dependent on government rations, tightening
Saddam's grip and heightening his power. In this
climate of fear, dishonesty and delusion
dominated. Underlings told bosses what they wanted
to hear rather than risk reprisals, right up to
the regime's highest levels. Even during the years
of sanctions, while Obeidi worked on industrial
projects, Saddam's men pestered him about
restarting the centrifuge program, an impossible
dream under the global spotlight. On the eve of
the 2003 invasion, many Iraqis believed regime
propaganda and expected to rout the infidels.
In a very readable narrative with the
elements of a spy thriller, Obeidi recounts how he
and his team acquired specialized material to make
high-speed centrifuges for uranium enrichment.
They used a variety of cover stories, claiming
they wanted items such as specialty steel and
magnets for other industrial applications,
feigning ignorance about potential lethal uses for
equipment and staying beneath the international
nuclear non-proliferation security radar. Western
ambivalence toward Iraq in the 1980s likely
contributed to their success, or at least turned a
blind eye to their activities. As US president
Ronald Reagan's emissary to Saddam Hussein, Donald
Rumsfeld, can tell you, many in the West favored
Iraq over Iran, fresh from its Islamic revolution,
in their eight-year standoff.
Obeidi's
overseas academic and professional associates and
his scientific legitimacy opened doors, including
obtaining from Italy key centrifuge blueprints
that were more tightly held in the US. Obeidi's
group also utilized a network of Iraqi government
front companies, diplomatic contacts, and outright
criminals to procure parts and expertise for the
program.
Though he doesn't blow his own
trumpet, the book underlines Obeidi's engineering
brilliance. To solve the riddle of nuclear
enrichment, he developed a landmark aluminum
barrier for enrichment by the gas-diffusion
method. That success led to a late-night meeting
with Kamel Hussein in 1987. Obeidi told Saddam
Hussein's son-in-law that the diffusion
breakthrough, though technically elegant, didn't
fit Iraq's limited industrial capabilities and
production of enriched uranium by diffusion would
be difficult to conceal from international
scrutiny.
Pressed for alternatives, Obeidi
proposed a centrifuge strategy and left the
meeting attached to the regime's Special Security
Branch in command of 200 engineers and technicians
on the secret crash program to pursue both
enrichment methods. The unsuccessful test of a
home-grown centrifuge, based on antiquated
technology, and a warning that Kamel Hussein was
"tired of failures", sent Obeidi and his team on
their shopping spree in the international
scientific community and the nuclear black market
for a more modern solution. Obeidi's ingenuity in
deception and engineering keyed the project's
success.
Writing to alert the world to the
relative ease of nuclear proliferation, Obeidi
warns that the real secrets for weapons of mass
destruction remain buried, not in gardens, but in
the minds of thousands of scientists around the
world. Their knowledge can still be exploited by
autocrats through threats and coercion. It's a
convincing argument, partially undermined by the
extraordinary resourcefulness of Obeidi and his
team, as well as improvements in the global
non-proliferation regime. But Obeidi's alarm is
important: the spread of nuclear weapons to India,
Pakistan and, apparently, North Korea shows that
the world still hasn't woken up.
The
Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam's Nuclear
Mastermind, by Mahdi Obeidi and Kurt Pitzer,
John Wiley & Sons, 2004, Hoboken, New Jersey.
ISBN: 0-471-67965-8. Price: US$24.95, 242 pages.
Gary LaMoshi has worked as a
broadcast producer and print writer and editor in
the US and Asia. Longtime editor of investor
rights advocate eRaider.com, he is also a
contributor to Slate and Salon.com.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact us for
information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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