Kuwait invasion 'killed Saddam's nuclear weapon programme'

The father of Iraq’s nuclear programme said his nation would have developed atomic weapons in the early 1990s had Saddam Hussein not ordered the invasion of Kuwait.

The invasion sparked the US-led Operation Desert Storm in 1991, which drove Iraq out of Kuwait and marked the end of Baghdad’s nuclear and biological weapons programme, said Jafar Dhia Jafar in Oslo.

“By the end of 1990, about 8,000 people were involved directly or indirectly in the nuclear programme,” he said said.

“We were three years away, give or take a year,” said Jafar, who fled Iraq during the US-led invasion in 2003.

Jafar said that there was no nuclear weapons programme in Iraq after 1991, and repeated his claim that UN weapons inspector Hans Blix and Mohamed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, knew that.

“I think they were heavily pressured not to come out with the truth,” he said.

In a book, Jafar describes being picked up in 1981 after 18 months in jail and brought to see Saddam, who, standing behind a desk in military uniform, instructed him to build an atomic bomb.

“From today, that is our goal,” Jafar recalled Hussein saying.

The British-educated scientist, with a doctorate in physics from the University of Birmingham, said the quest for nuclear weapons began with Israeli warplanes bombing the legal Iraqi nuclear reactor at Tuwaitha, near Baghdad, where he had worked, in June 1981.

The book’s publisher, Spartacus, said versions in English and possibly other languages are planned.