Ha! Ha!
That's really funny. Even the UN inspectors knew Saddam was working on the bomb. But they did not find out how just how far he had gotten. Why? Because he hid it from them. His Nuclear Mastermind Mahdi Obeidi, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist, estimated that he was 6 months to a year away from having a bomb completed. When Saddam invaded Kuwait it brought the whole project to a halt. Lucky for us HW Bush invaded when he did in 1991. Otherwise we would have had a nuclear Iraq. After the Persian Gulf War the UN inspectors came in and found a lot of stuff. But they never found the blueprints which Mahdi Obeidi designed and used to build the gas centrifuge to enriched uranium for Saddam. It was turned over to the US after the Invasion 2003. THE MSM suppressed that little story because they are not interested in the truth, like you apparently.
However if you want to read the truth about it you can find it here:
The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam's Nuclear Mastermind
http://www.amazon.com/Bomb-My-Garden-Secrets-Mastermind/dp/0471679658How Close Did Iraq Come?
In The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam's Nuclear Mastermind (Wiley, $24.95), a former Iraqi nuclear scientist, Mahdi Obeidi, describes in jaw-dropping detail how Iraq acquired the means to produce highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient to building a nuclear weapon, by the eve of the first Gulf War. Had Saddam Hussein not made the fatal mistake of invading Kuwait in August 1990, he probably would have possessed a crude atomic bomb by 1992 or 1993, insulating his regime from the threat of foreign invasion.
Relatively unknown in the West until recently, Obeidi was the Iraqi scientist responsible for developing a gas centrifuge, the most direct and efficient route to enriching uranium. After U.N. arms inspectors forced Iraq to close its nuclear weapons program following the 1991 Gulf War, he buried a prototype of his centrifuge in his backyard in Baghdad (hence his book's title). After the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, Obeidi turned over this last remnant of the Iraqi nuclear program to the United States and teamed up with American reporter Kurt Pitzer to write this book.
The result offers insights into how a determined dictator, backed by sufficient resources, can come within reach of acquiring the world's most horrific weapons. It is a tale of cruelty and ruthlessness on the part of Hussein but also of naiveté and greed on the part of Western scientists who enabled Iraq to take shortcuts toward becoming a nuclear power. Obeidi's early centrifuge experiments ended in failure in January 1988. But with the help of American, French and above all German scientists, he was able to create a reliable prototype by the spring of 1990, paving the way to mass production of enriched uranium. One German scientist, Bruno Stemmler, sold Iraq samples of many of the components of a centrifuge for just over a million dollars. A mysterious English-Pakistani businessman identified only as Malik agreed to provide 100 tons of high-grade hardened steel for $7 million. By Obeidi's calculations, this was enough steel to produce sufficient enriched uranium for 10 Hiroshima-type bombs a year. If a relatively well-off German scientist was willing to sell the key components of a centrifuge for $1 million, imagine how little it costs to bribe a desperately poor Russian or Ukrainian.
Who's Next?
Among the jarring juxtapositions in The Bomb in My Garden are the contrasts between the macabre nature of the nuclear-weapons trade and the reassuring surroundings in which the transactions took place: a tea shop in the London suburb of Wimbledon, a nightclub off the Champs-Elysées in Paris, a four-star hotel in Bonn.
By Michael Dobbs
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