Declaration details Iraqi nuclear effort

IRAQ’S arms dossier outlines its secret bids to build a nuclear weapon in the past and may list countries and companies that helped it, the table of contents suggests.

The nine-page table was released after Washington took the UN Security Council's only copy of the 12,000-page dossier to make copies for the four other permanent members Britain, France, Russia and China.

A former inspector who reviewed the table of contents said it appeared Iraq had resubmitted old reports detailing programmes that ended in the wake of the Gulf War more than a decade ago. Inspectors have said Iraq's previous declarations were incomplete.

"This seems to confirm that on the nuclear side, the declaration has been recycled," said David Albright, an American who served on the nuclear inspections team in the 1990s. "A lot of this is pre-1991."

The table of contents released to the public has four sections: nuclear, chemical, biological and ballistic missile programmes.

The nuclear programme before 1991 takes up 2,100 pages. Another 300 pages in Arabic detail current nuclear programmes, which Baghdad claims are civilian.

Iraq may have been close to building an atomic bomb before 1991, but no longer has such ambitions, Lieutenant General Amer al-Saadi, a senior adviser to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, has said.

The chemical declaration runs to several thousand pages and chronicles Iraq's "former chemical weapons programme". Sections include "relations with companies", "foreign technical assistance" and a "terminated radiation bomb project".

The biological section declaration contains information on military institutions connected with the former biological weapons programme, activities at a foot-and-mouth facility and a list of supporting documents.

The ballistic missile declaration is the briefest, with about 1,200 pages.

Under UN Security Council resolutions, Iraq is banned from missiles with a range greater than 94 miles.

A radiation bomb project was discovered during the previous inspections regime, which ended in 1998 amid UN-Iraqi disputes over access to sites and over US spies within the UN operation.

Iraq yesterday accused the US of "unprecedented extortion" by taking the only copy of the arms declaration and claimed Washington might alter the report as a cover for launching a military attack.

"This is unprecedented extortion in the history of the United Nations, when it (US) forced the president of the Security Council to give it the original copy of Iraq's declaration in contradiction with the agreement by all members of Security Council," Iraqi Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri, said in a statement.

The Bush administration began scrutinising the document immediately but said it would take time to go through the voluminous report. A White House spokesman said "there's scepticism and there's fear" about what the Iraqi regime was doing.

The Iraqi Foreign Ministry statement claimed Washington would not hand over copies to the other permanent Security Council members until the United States was finished "studying it first and possibly forging what it wants to forge".

United Nations arms experts fanned out to inspect several new sites across Iraq yesterday, including the alleged centre of Iraq's nuclear programme.

It was the largest one-day operation by UN inspectors since their hunt for alleged banned weapons resumed last month.

A team of inspectors drove for five hours to examine a facility near the Syrian border 250 miles northwest of Baghdad that is reported to have

produced refined uranium ore for Iraq's nuclear programme.