(Space Imaging EOSAT)

(Space Imaging EOSAT)

(Washington Post map)

United Nations arms inspectors and the International Atomic Energy Agency say Iraq continues to play a deadly shellgame that conceals many of the most dangerous weapons that survived the 1991 Gulf War.

The satellite images, maps and photographs collected here identify the centers of Iraq’s military command system and its nuclear, chemical and biological warfare program. Click on the dots for more detailed photographs and information about more than 60 sites in Iraq.

Finding the Weapons
The U.N. inspectors have destroyed dozens of factories and confiscated millions of pages of records concerning Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological warfare programs during the past seven years. They’ve installed dozens of tagged video cameras to keep watch on “dual use” industrial equipment that Iraq could one day convert to weapons production.

Overall, U.N. inspectors "have been succeeding phenomenally well under very difficult circumstances," says Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, chair of the Federation of American Scientists' biological weapons verification working group.

The joint inspections by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) may be the most sophisticated campaign ever undertaken to wipe out a country’s weapons of mass destruction.

Even so, UNSCOM’s representatives say thousands of gallons of germ weapons, chemical weapons and some parts of Iraq’s nuclear program remain impossible to trace, at least for the moment. Iraq at one time claimed that it destroyed many such weapons by itself shortly after the 1991 Gulf War and that most of its efforts to build weapons of mass destruction never bore fruit.

But U.N. inspectors say Iraq’s unilateral destruction was one step in an ongoing cover-up of its military capabilities. Even Iraq’s reports to UNSCOM have been revised and revised again each time inspectors discover new evidence that shows that the regime's earlier admissions have been intentionally misleading or incomplete.