October 25, 2004
TRACKING THE WEAPONS
Huge Cache of Explosives Vanish From Site in Iraq
/This article was reported and written by James Glanz, William J. Broad
and David E. Sanger./
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 24 - The Iraqi interim government has warned the
United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons
of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make
missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of
Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.
storage for weapons explosives photo
A 1996 photograph of a bunker where high-density explosives were stored
at Al Qaqaa, an Iraqi military facility south of Baghdad. /
(photo NYTIMES)/
The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American
military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by
looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had
monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon
officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the
American-led invasion last year.
The White House said President Bush's national security adviser,
Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the explosives
were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed.
American officials have never publicly announced the disappearance, but
beginning last week they answered questions about it posed by The New
York Times and the CBS News program "60 Minutes."
Administration officials said Sunday that the Iraq Survey Group, the
C.I.A. task force that searched for unconventional weapons, has been
ordered to investigate the disappearance of the explosives.
American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the
explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or
Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could produce bombs
strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings.
The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland,
in 1988 used less than a pound of the same type of material, and larger
amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in
November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow
apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people.
The explosives could also be used to trigger a nuclear weapon, which was
why international nuclear inspectors had kept a watch on the material,
and even sealed and locked some of it. The other components of an atom
bomb - the design and the radioactive fuel - are more difficult to obtain.
"This is a high explosives risk, but not necessarily a proliferation
risk," one senior Bush administration official said.
The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the danger
of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it
specifically told United States officials about the need to keep the
explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week.
Administration officials say they cannot explain why the explosives were
not safeguarded, beyond the fact that the occupation force was
overwhelmed by the amount of munitions they found throughout the country.
A Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said Sunday evening that Saddam
Hussein's government "stored weapons in mosques, schools, hospitals and
countless other locations," and that the allied forces "have discovered
and destroyed perhaps thousands of tons of ordnance of all types." A
senior military official noted that HMX and RDX were "available around
the world" and not on the nuclear nonproliferation list, even though
they are used in the nuclear warheads of many nations.
The Qaqaa facility, about 30 miles south of Baghdad, was well known to
American intelligence officials: Mr. Hussein made conventional warheads
at the site, and the I.A.E.A. dismantled parts of his nuclear program
there in the early 1990's after the Persian Gulf war in 1991. In the
prelude to the 2003 invasion, Mr. Bush cited a number of other "dual
use" items - including tubes that the administration contended could be
converted to use for the nuclear program - as a justification for
invading Iraq.
After the invasion, when widespread looting began in Iraq, the
international weapons experts grew concerned that the Qaqaa stockpile
could fall into unfriendly hands. In May, an internal I.A.E.A.
memorandum warned that terrorists might be helping "themselves to the
greatest explosives bonanza in history."
Earlier this month, in a letter to the I.A.E.A. in Vienna, a senior
official from Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology wrote that the
stockpile disappeared after early April 2003 because of "the theft and
looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security."
In an interview with The Times and "60 Minutes" in Baghdad, the
minister of science and technology, Rashad M. Omar, confirmed the facts
described in the letter. "Yes, they are missing," Dr. Omar said. "We
don't know what happened." The I.A.E.A. says it also does not know, and
has reported that machine tools that can be used for either nuclear or
non-nuclear purposes have also been looted.
Dr. Omar said that after the American-led invasion, the sites
containing the explosives were under the control of the Coalition
Provisional Authority, an American-led entity that was the highest
civilian authority in Iraq until it handed sovereignty of the country
over to the interim government on June 28.
"After the collapse of the regime, our liberation, everything was under
the coalition forces, under their control," Dr. Omar said. "So probably
they can answer this question, what happened to the materials."
Officials in Washington said they had no answers to that question. One
senior official noted that the Qaqaa complex where the explosives were
stored was listed as a "medium priority" site on the Central
Intelligence Agency's list of more than 500 sites that needed to be
searched and secured during the invasion. "Should we have gone there?
Definitely," said one senior administration official.
In the chaos that followed the invasion, however, many of those sites,
even some considered a higher priority, were never secured.
*
A No Man's Land*
Seeing the ruined bunkers at the vast Qaqaa complex today, it is hard to
recall that just two years ago it was part of Saddam Hussein's secret
military complex. The bunkers are so large that they are reminiscent of
pyramids, though with rounded edges and the tops chopped off. Several
are blackened and eviscerated as a result of American bombing.
Smokestacks rise in the distance.
Today, Al Qaqaa has become a wasteland generally avoided even by the
marines in charge of northern Babil Province. Headless bodies are found
there. An ammunition dump has been looted, and on Sunday an Iraqi
employee of The New York Times who made a furtive visit to the site saw
looters tearing out metal fixtures. Bare pipes within the darkened
interior of one of the buildings were a tangled mess, zigzagging along
charred walls. Someone fired a shot, probably to frighten the visitors off.
"It's like Mars on Earth," said Maj. Dan Whisnant, an intelligence
officer for the Second Battalion, 24th Marine Regiment. "It would take
probably 10 battalions 10 years to clear that out."
Mr. Hussein's engineers acquired HMX and RDX when they embarked on a
crash effort to build an atomic bomb in the late 1980's. It did not go
smoothly.
In 1989, a huge blast ripped through Al Qaqaa, the boom reportedly
heard hundreds of miles away. The explosion, it was later determined,
occurred when a stockpile of the high explosives ignited.
After the Persian Gulf war in 1991, the United Nations discovered
Iraq's clandestine effort and put the United Nations arms agency in
charge of Al Qaqaa's huge stockpile. Weapon inspectors determined that
Iraq had bought the explosives from France, China and Yugoslavia, a
European diplomat said.
None of the explosives were destroyed, arms experts familiar with the
decision recalled, because Iraq argued that it should be allowed to keep
them for eventual use in mining and civilian construction. But Al Qaqaa
was still under the authority of the Military Industrial Council, which
ran Iraq's sensitive weapons programs and was led for a time by Hussein
Kamel, Mr. Hussein's son-in-law. He defected to the West, then returned
to Iraq and was immediately killed.
In 1996, the United Nations hauled away some of the HMX and used it to
blow up Al Hakam, a vast Iraqi factory for making germ weapons.
The Qaqaa stockpile went unmonitored from late 1998, when United
Nations inspectors left Iraq, to late 2002, when they came back. Upon
their return, the inspectors discovered that about 35 tons of HMX were
missing. The Iraqis said they had used the explosive mainly in civilian
programs.
The remaining stockpile was no secret. Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the
director general of the arms agency, frequently talked about it publicly
as he investigated - in late 2002 and early 2003 - the Bush
administration's claims that Iraq was secretly renewing its pursuit of
nuclear arms. He ordered his weapons inspectors to conduct an inventory,
and publicly reported their findings to the Security Council on Jan. 9,
2003.
During the following weeks, the I.A.E.A. repeatedly drew public
attention to the explosives. In New York on Feb. 14, nine days after
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented his arms case to the
Security Council, Dr. ElBaradei reported that the agency had found no
sign of new atom endeavors but "has continued to investigate the
relocation and consumption of the high explosive HMX."
A European diplomat reported that Jacques Baute, head of the arms
agency's Iraq nuclear inspection team, warned officials at the United
States mission in Vienna about the danger of the nuclear sites and
materials once under I.A.E.A. supervision, including Al Qaqaa.
But apparently, little was done. A senior Bush administration official
said that during the initial race to Baghdad, American forces "went
through the bunkers, but saw no materials bearing the I.A.E.A. seal." It
is unclear whether troops ever returned.
By late 2003, diplomats said, arms agency experts had obtained
commercial satellite photos of Al Qaqaa showing that two of roughly 10
bunkers that contained HMX appeared to have been leveled by titanic
blasts, apparently during the war. They presumed some of the HMX had
exploded, but that is unclear.
Other HMX bunkers were untouched. Some were damaged but not devastated.
I.A.E.A. experts say they assume that just before the invasion the
Iraqis followed their standard practice of moving crucial explosives out
of buildings, so they would not be tempting targets. If so, the experts
say, the Iraqi must have broken seals from the arms agency on bunker
doors and moved most of the HMX to nearby fields, where it would have
been lightly camouflaged - and ripe for looting.
But the Bush administration would not allow the agency back into the
country to verify the status of the stockpile. In May 2004, Iraqi
officials say in interviews, they warned L. Paul Bremer III, the
American head of the occupation authority, that Al Qaqaa had probably
been looted. It is unclear if that warning was passed anywhere. Efforts
to reach Mr. Bremer by telephone were unsuccessful.
But by the spring of 2004, the Americans were preoccupied with the
transfer of authority to Iraq, and the insurgency was gaining strength.
"It's not an excuse," said one senior administration official. "But a
lot of things went by the boards."
Early this month, Dr. ElBaradei put public pressure on the interim
Iraqi government to start the process of accounting for nuclear-related
materials still ostensibly under I.A.E.A. supervision, including the
Qaqaa stockpile.
"Iraq is obliged," he wrote to the president of the Security Council on
Oct. 1, "to declare semiannually changes that have occurred or are
foreseen."
The agency, Dr. ElBaradei added pointedly, "has received no such
notifications or declarations from any state since the agency's
inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq in March 2003."
*A Lost Stockpile*
Two weeks ago, on Oct. 10, Dr. Mohammed J. Abbas of the Iraqi Ministry
of Science and Technology wrote a letter to the I.A.E.A. to say the
Qaqaa stockpile had been lost. He added that his ministry had judged
that an "urgent updating of the registered materials is required."
A chart in his letter listed 341.7 metric tons, about 377 American
tons, of HMX, RDX and PETN as missing.
The explosives missing from Al Qaqaa are the strongest and fastest in
common use by militaries around the globe. The Iraqi letter identified
the vanished stockpile as containing 194.7 metric tons of HMX, which
stands for "high melting point explosive," 141.2 metric tons of RDX,
which stands for "rapid detonation explosive," among other designations,
and 5.8 metric tons of PETN, which stands for "pentaerythritol
tetranitrate." The total is roughly 340 metric tons or nearly 380
American tons.
Five days later, on Oct. 15, European diplomats said, the arms agency
wrote the United States mission in Vienna to forward the Iraqi letter
and ask that the American authorities inform the international coalition
in Iraq of the missing explosives.
Dr. ElBaradei, a European diplomat said, is "extremely concerned" about
the potentially "devastating consequences" of the vanished stockpile.
Its fate remains unknown. Glenn Earhart, manager of an Army Corps of
Engineers program in Huntsville, Ala., that is in charge of rounding up
and destroying lost Iraqi munitions, said he and his colleagues knew
nothing of the whereabouts of the Qaqaa stockpile.
Administration officials say Iraq was awash in munitions, including
other stockpiles of exotic explosives.
"The only reason this stockpile was under seal," said one senior
administration official, "is because it was located at Al Qaqaa," where
nuclear work had gone on years ago.
As a measure of the size of the stockpile, one large truck can carry
about 10 tons, meaning that the missing explosives could fill a fleet of
almost 40 trucks.
By weight, these explosives pack far more destructive power than TNT, so
armies often use them in shells, bombs, mines, mortars and many types of
conventional ordinance.
"HMX and RDX have a lot of shattering power," said Dr. Van Romero, vice
president for research at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and
Technology, or New Mexico Tech, which specializes in explosives.
"Getting a large amount is difficult," he added, because most nations
carefully regulate who can buy such explosives, though civilian experts
can sometimes get licenses to use them for demolition and mining.
*An Immediate Danger*
A special property of HMX and RDX lends them to smuggling and terrorism,
experts said. While violently energetic when detonated, they are
insensitive to shock and physical abuse during handling and transport
because of their chemical stability. A hammer blow does nothing. It
takes a detonator, like a blasting cap, to release the stored energy.
Experts said the insensitivity made them safer to transport than the
millions of unexploded shells, mines and pieces of live ammunition that
litter Iraq. And its benign appearance makes it easy to disguise as
harmless goods, easily slipped across borders.
"The immediate danger" of the lost stockpile, said an expert who
recently led a team that searched Iraq for deadly arms, "is its
potential use with insurgents in very small and powerful explosive
devices. The other danger is that it can easily move into the terrorist
web across the Middle East."
More worrisome to the I.A.E.A. - and to some in Washington - is that HMX
and RDX are used in standard nuclear weapons design. In a nuclear
implosion weapon, the explosives crush a hollow sphere of uranium or
plutonium into a critical mass, initiating the nuclear explosion.
A crude implosion device - like the one that the United States tested
in 1945 in the New Mexican desert and then dropped on Nagasaki, Japan -
needs about a ton of high explosive to crush the core and start the
chain reaction.
/ James Glanz reported from Baghdad and Yusifiya, Iraq, for this
article, William J. Broad from New York and Vienna, and David E. Sanger
from Washington and Crawford, Tex. Khalid al-Ansary contributed
reporting from Baghdad./
Copyright 2004 The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/international/middleeast/25bomb.html
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