No nukes

last updated 8 January 2015

Baghdad

The U.S. has found no evidence that Iraq restarted its nuclear-weapons program after the Gulf War, The Washington Post reported this week. Saddam Hussein did have nuclear ambitions, but he had “no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials, or obtain the technology he needed for either.” In the run-up to the most recent war, the Bush administration cited Iraq’s purchase of aluminum tubes as evidence that Saddam was trying to enrich uranium. But inspectors have found that the tubes were in fact artillery-rocket casings, as Iraq claimed. Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program was destroyed once, in 1981, when Israel bombed a reactor, and again in 1991, during the Gulf War.