Search in Iraq Fails to Find Nuclear Threat

Neither man replied to messages left by voice mail and e-mail. Steve Wampler, a spokesman at Livermore, said, "They really don't talk about their work." A U.S. government official, speaking for the administration but declining to be named, denied that the two physicists had reached final conclusions. "Domke may be coming back soon," the official said. "Their work is not completed."

Tim McCarthy, an experienced U.N. inspector who returned to Iraq late last month to join Kay's team, said in an interview before departing that the Iraqi rocket program based on 81mm tubes had been known to Western analysts "well before 1996." McCarthy said inspectors gave the tubes "maybe three minutes out of 100 hours" of attention because they did not appear to be important.

Meekin said the Nasr 81 rocket "appeared in a public arms show in 1999" at which Iraqi munitions were displayed for sale. Such sales would have been illegal under U.N. Security Council sanctions, but hardly secret. Meekin said trade magazines covered the show.

Partly for those reasons, the American-led search teams did not even visit Nasr until July. Iraqi Brig. Gen. Shehab Haythem showed them around, the tubes laid out in neat rows. Investigators sent samples to the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and left the rest.

Today, Ash Shaykhili is a hulk. What it contained, apart from demolished remnants of the 1991 program, was exactly the kind of equipment that the CIA cited as part of its compelling case for Iraq's nuclear threat: "magnets, high-speed balancing machines, and machine tools."

"They're not acting as if they take their own analysis seriously," said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "If they were so worried about these tubes, that would be the kind of sensitive equipment you'd think the administration would want to seize, to prevent it from going somewhere else -- Iran, Syria, Egypt."

The investigation to date, Meekin said, suggests that Iraqi efforts to obtain dangerous technology since 1991 met with modest success at best.

"By and large, our judgment is that sanctions have been pretty good, or the sanctions effort, to prevent the import of components," he said. In the realm of nuclear proliferation, he said, "I guess there's more fertile ground in North Korea or Iran."

CORRECTION-DATE: November 1, 2003

CORRECTION:

An Oct. 26 article incorrectly described the size of the force searching for evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program. Of those hunting forbidden weapons in Iraq, 1 percent, not one-tenth of 1 percent, are devoted to the search for nuclear arms. The story also erred in describing the qualifications of William Domke, an employee of an Energy Department laboratory. He is an authority on Iraq's former centrifuge enrichment program, but he is not a physicist.