A Lit Fuse
Saddam’s Bombmaker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi
Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda
by Khidhir Hamza with Jeff Stein
Scribner. 352 pp. $26.00
Reviewed by
Daniel Pipes
MOST NUCLEAR physicists these days lead a fairly humdrum existence; but not
if they live in Iraq. Khidhir Hamza, born in that country in 1939, and
fascinated by electricity from a young age, attended Baghdad University before
receiving a master’s degree from MIT and a Ph.D. in theoretical nuclear
physics from Florida State University in 1968. After beginning his teaching
career at an American college, he was summoned back to teach in Iraq in order
to pay off his educational debts.
Invited to join the nascent Iraqi nuclear effort in
1972, Hamza did so with some enthusiasm, considering it a wonderful
professional challenge. At the time, he did not rate very highly the prospects
of a bomb actually being built; and, he reasoned, even if that should somehow
come to pass, surely the weapon would be used as a negotiating chip vis-à-vis
Israel and nothing more. “The mission,” he writes here, was in any case
“breathtaking: build a nuclear bomb from scratch, starting on a dining-room
table.”
Hamza soon began a long march through the bureaucracy, manifesting, in
addition to his talents as a scientist and scholar, a finely tuned aptitude
for staying out of trouble. Of Iraq’s three original
nuclear scientists, he alone in those early years managed to escape the
capricious wrath of Saddam Hussein, who was still making his way toward the
absolute power he would gain in 1979. By 1981, Hamza was working
directly for Saddam; by 1987, he had reached the position of director general
of Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program.
His new status inevitably brought head-turning benefits: a high salary,
fancy cars, travel to the West, even a residence within the presidential
compound. “All that loot was softening me up, I don’t deny it,” Hamza writes
in Saddam’s Bombmaker. “But it was the project itself, the enormity of
the task, and the pure, scientific challenge of cracking the atomic code, that
excited me more.”
Even as he rose through the ranks, however, Hamza worried about surviving
his contact with Saddam. With time, indeed, his absorbing intellectual venture
turned into a descent into a kind of Stalinist
hell. Not only did colleagues begin to
turn up murdered, but it was becoming increasingly clear that Saddam Hussein
actually intended to use the bombs Hamza was working on developing.
Though himself untouched by torture or other barbarities, and still
benefiting from occasional trips abroad (“just walking down Broadway [in New
York] and breathing free air was invigorating”), Saddam’s chief nuclear
scientist saw enough to want out.
In 1987, he began trying to extricate himself not just from building the
bomb but from Iraq. He achieved the first goal three years later, leaving
active administration and returning to the classroom. In 1994, although
feeling “too old, too comfortable, [and] too scared,” he managed to accomplish
the second. After a particularly stressful year in limbo,
mostly in Libya, he was finally joined by his wife and three sons. The
family settled quietly in the United States, and Hamza underwent a
comprehensive debriefing.
Today, rightly fearful that Saddam wants him dead, Hamza lives in a
semi-underground manner, partly by means of tactics taught him many years
earlier for evading Israeli agents. Although he has been well-known in the
circles of Iraq-watchers, Saddam’s Bombmaker represents his most
sustained effort to go public. A memoir, and a compellingly written one
(thanks in large part to his co-writer Jeff Stein), it also contains important
and reliable information, from a credible author, on two quite distinct topics
of current interest: the inner workings of the Iraqi nuclear-weapons project,
and life at the highest levels of the Iraqi regime. It is hard to say which is
scarier.
HAZMA ESTABLISHES that Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program has followed two
principal stages. The initial one, lasting from 1972 until
1981, involved a relatively small investment of money and depended heavily on
imported (mostly French) technology. The second one began with the Israeli
destruction of Iraq’s Osirak reactor in June 1981, an event that spurred the
regime to rethink and radically expand its whole program. Hamza thus agrees
with Shimon Peres’s controversial assessment that, from Israel’s point
of view, the attack on Osirak was a mistake.
After 1981, in any event, and proceeding more or less
indigenously, the Iraqis devoted 25 times more resources than previously to
the bomb. Their headlong effort culminated in 1990 with (in Hamza’s words) “a
crude, one-and-a-half ton nuclear device”—not quite yet a bomb, and far too
large to be carried on a missile, but an important step along the
way.
As Hamza documents, the outside world was slow to recognize the change from
stage one to stage two, and this had important consequences in the aftermath
of the Gulf war. Not realizing how much the Iraqis themselves had
accomplished, those leading the disarmament efforts after 1991 focused not on
Iraq’s capabilities—both material and intellectual—but on actual weapons.
Destroying those weapons would have made sense had
Saddam’s regime depended on imported material and talent; as things stood, it
was a nearly futile undertaking, for they could always be rebuilt. Only
in mid-1995, when the U.S. government simultaneously debriefed Hamza and his
former boss (and Saddam’s son-in-law) Hussein Kamil, did it realize the true
scope of Iraq’s program.
According to Hamza, it was his identification of the 25
or so key nuclear scientists in Iraq, and where they could be found, that
drove Saddam to close down international inspections in mid-1998. Today, Hamza
estimated at a recent presentation in New York, Iraq is “undoubtedly on the
precipice of nuclear power,” and will have “between three to five
nuclear weapons by 2005.” What it will do then is a nice
question, the answer to which depends in part on circumstances but in much
larger part on the designs, and the character, of its president.
THIS IS where Hamza’s second topic comes in: Saddam Hussein’s personality
and the nature of the regime he has built up. One thing we learn from this
book is that, in common with other despots of recent times, he is a man who
sees danger truly everywhere. Thus, he has “a terrible fear, perhaps paranoia,
about germs”; any visitor to a room where he is present must undergo an eye,
ear, and mouth inspection before entering. Stalin, one recalls, had his
regime’s top figures sample his food; Mao suspected his swimming pool was
poisoned, and refused medical care at the hands of doctors he was sure would
do him in.
Saddam also has a taste for virgins—who, among other desirable qualities,
are thought to be less disease-prone. In one anecdote related by Hamza, a
young woman who pleaded with the president for aid after the death of her
father ended up losing her virginity after having been given a beauty makeover
and left naked on a bed to await his (wordless) pleasure. Although she was let
go with an envelope of money, other “young, beautiful, and flirtatious” women
who have serviced Saddam find themselves retained as virtual slaves to clean
the apartments of his nomenklatura. Or else not retained at all; Hamza
tells of one who was discovered in a bathtub with her throat slit.
Hamza likewise confirms the picture of Saddam as someone “incalculably
cruel,” a man whose taste for personal brutality is exercised frequently and
unpredictably. Once, listening to suggestions he considered defeatist, the
president pulled out a revolver and simply shot dead the military officer
making them; at a meeting with his top leadership, he abruptly had a general
whisked off to the torture cells; a guard who incautiously confided the
president’s whereabouts—to a personal friend of the president—was shot on the
spot for indiscretion. Hamza’s phrase for Saddam is “an expertly tailored,
well-barbered gangster”; the description fits. To the woman who told about
losing her virginity to Saddam, his yellow eyes “were the eyes of death. He
looked at me as if I were a corpse.”
A NUCLEAR bomb, in the hands of such a man, is bound to be cataclysmically
dangerous, rendering him, as Hamza has put it in a recent television
interview, all but “invincible”: the “hero of the Arab world” and readier than
ever to indulge his well-proven appetite for recklessness. The result—for
Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and of course Israel—is almost too frightening to
contemplate.
What then is to be done? In Hamza’s view, there are only two ways to stop
the current train of events from unfolding toward catastrophe. Best by far
would be to get rid of Saddam himself. But this can only happen if the U.S.
government either acts on its own to bring it about or provides the necessary
lethal aid to the Iraqi opposition. Second best would be to begin an emergency
program to deprive Saddam of the skills of his 25 top nuclear scientists,
preferably by getting them out of the country.
Unmentioned by Hamza but certainly valuable are such initiatives, currently
being considered or implemented by the Bush administration, as boost-phase
missile defenses to protect our allies, energy substitutes to deprive Saddam
of oil revenues, and a renewed embargo. But in the end, as
this truly alarming book shows, which path we take is less important than
recognizing how late the hour has grown, and how urgently we need to
move the question of Iraq to the very top of our foreign-policy agenda.
DANIEL PIPES is director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum and
a columnist for the Jerusalem
Post.