AN ATOMIC SHIELD AND SWORD FOR CONQUEST

N U C L E A R V I S I O N

SADDAM HUSSEIN’S

N O R M A N C I G A R

MIDDL E EAST STUDI ES OCCASIONAL PAP ERS

NUMBER ONE | JUNE 2011
An Atomic Shield and Sword for Conquest

N O R M A N C I G A R

N U C L E A R V I S I O N

S A D D A M H U S S E I N ’ S

MIDDL E EAST STUDI ES OCCASIONAL PAP ERS

NUMBER ONE | JUNE 2011
Published by

Marine Corps University Press

3078 Upshur Avenue

Quantico, VA

22134

1st Printing, 2011
iii

This study is dedicated to my wife, Nidhal, who has just returned from service

with the U.S. Army in Iraq.

DEDICATION
iv

The author would like to express his gratitude to the Earhart Foundation for a

generous grant which made possible the research and writing of this study, and to

Paul Bernstein, Michael Eisenstadt, and Jerrold Post for their valuable comments

on early drafts. Special thanks to Barry R. Schneider, USAF Counterproliferation

Center, Maxwell AFB, for his encouragement, insightful observations, and

constructive advice, and to Ms. Christy Truitt, that Center’s copy editor, and to

Ms. Stephanie Kramer and Ms.Andrea Connell for their expert help with editing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
v

This study examines why Saddam Hussein pursued nuclear weapons and, as a

basic aspect of that question, how he might have employed that capability had he

acquired it, whether for deterrence, warfighting, or something else. As the key

decision maker in Iraq, Saddam's own thinking was central. His perception of

regional threats, primarily from Iran and Israel,were a prime motivator.In addition,

Saddam viewed acquiring nuclear weapons as a potent vehicle to help legitimize

his regime and burnish his personal image as leader both at home and in the Arab

World, as a modernizer and defender of national interests.A better understanding

of the Iraqi case can also clarify the enduring issues related to how regional leaders

may view nuclear weapons in this world of looming proliferation.

The West often tended to assume that if Iraq ever acquired this capability, it would

have adopted a posture similar to that which had characterized the theory and

practice of the superpowers during the Cold War,resulting in a more stable mutual

deterrence. However, rather than viewing nuclear weapons as a stabilizing factor

through strategic deterrence, Iraqi thinking suggested a potentially destabilizing

approach, given the intent to change the status quo and the balance of power in the

region. Iraqi thinking on deterrence entailed a far from benign “aggressive

deterrence” by providing a shield for a more assertive—and potentially very

disruptive—policy beyond Iraq’s borders.Iraq also perceived that nuclear weapons

had a warfighting role, in addition to a deterrence role, with nuclear military

doctrine developed even at the operational level. Iraqi military doctrinal

publications and operational documents from the 1980s, developed with the

anticipated imminent acquisition of a nuclear weapons capability, contain the

distilled rationale, assumptions, and real-world preparation for Iraq’s development,

force integration, and use of such weapons.Moreover,the Iraqi regime’s threshold

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
vi

for use of such weapons seems to have been considerably lower than conventional

wisdom posited (at least in regional conflicts).

The Iraqi case first highlights the risk of mirror imaging another country’s

perceptions and intentions, especially in the realm of nuclear weapons,where there

are limited historical precedents. Understanding a leader’s worldview—especially

in authoritarian political systems where decision making may be highly

personalized—is key to evaluating the perspective and potential behavior of an

actual or would-be nuclear power. Second, and related to the differences in

leadership and strategic culture, the Iraqi case indicates that first, the concept of

nuclear deterrence and its relationship to stability needs to be revaluated in general

in a less absolute—and less optimistic—direction and second, that it cannot be

applied mechanistically. As seen from Saddam’s thinking, leaders of emerging

nuclear powers may conceptualize deterrence not only in a purely defensive mode,

but also as a shield permitting greater aggressive activity at a lower level on the

assumption that escalation to nuclear war may be controlled and an adversary’s

nuclear arsenal thus neutralized.Third, an assumption that nuclear weapons would

never be used in a warfighting mode may be flawed. The result could well be the

actual operational use of such weapons, especially against an adversary who was

not similarly armed. Fourth, even a small nuclear arsenal in the wrong hands can

be sufficient to cause significant negative consequences for U.S. interests. Given

Saddam’s perceptions and political objectives,Iraq’s initial acquisition of even a few

nuclear weapons could have had a disproportionate impact on U.S. interests and on

regional stability. Finally, modifying the regional threat environment may alleviate

the pressures for proliferation. What can be done in this case is to remove or

diminish the sources of perceived insecurity that can magnify threat perceptions

and serve as a potent stimulus to fuel further proliferation. This may reduce or at

least slow down, if not eliminate, further proliferation.

Overall, this study suggests that any trend toward nuclear proliferation could

contribute to destabilizing effects—as was the case with Iraq—and argues for the

desirability of continuing vigorous international efforts to halt or slow proliferation.
vii

Page

Introduction ix

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 1

Conclusions 51

Appendix 59

Notes 61

About the Author 89

CONTENTS
viii Norman Cigar

MIDDLE EAST AND VICINITY

803463AI (G00412) 6-10
The intent of this study is to clarify why Saddam Hussein of Iraq wanted to acquire

nuclear weapons. His regime never did obtain this capability despite its longstanding intent and concerted efforts to do so; to that extent, discussions about its

outlook on this topic in a way remain theoretical.Nevertheless,Iraq certainly came

close enough to reaching its goal, as apparently it was well on its way to doing so

had the 1990–91 Gulf War not intervened. Moreover, apart from the interest in

evaluating a key aspect of Iraq’s recent history, there is also broader merit in

understanding the enduring issues related to how regional leaders may view nuclear

weapons in this world of looming proliferation.

Of course, as National Defense University professor Gawdat Bahgat has noted,

“Each state’s experiment with nuclear weapons is unique and reflects domestic,

regional, and international dynamics at specific times.”1 Given the personalitydominant systems which often govern in aspiring nuclear countries, one may well

encounter idiosyncrasies in behavior in each situation. However, case studies such

as that of Iraq can provide useful insights into shared thinking about the perceived

utility of nuclear weapons in such situations and can help refine the relevant

questions to ask when evaluating how a given leadership might be thinking about

nuclear weapons development, acquisition, and use.

The debate has been long-standing between the “optimists”—those who see the

spread of nuclear weapons as a potentially stabilizing factor through the resulting

implementation of a strategic balance that mutually deters potential adversaries—

and the “pessimists”—who, on the contrary, view proliferation as destabilizing and

raising the risk of a nuclear confrontation. An inherently related issue is whether

states view nuclear weapons as a doomsday weapon to be used only as a deterrent

or also as a potential warfighting tool.This study will argue that Saddam Hussein

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision ix

INTRODUCTION
perceived nuclear weapons to be useful as both a deterrent to enemy attacks and

as an offensive tool, as well as a source of prestige.

THE TERMS OF REFERENCE

Scott Sagan has provided a useful approach to understanding why states acquire

nuclear weapons by identifying three main motivations or models: as a response to

foreign threats, as a result of domestic political and bureaucratic dynamics, and as

a symbol of a state’s modernity and identity. Elements of this taxonomy will be

utilized in the ensuing analysis, including how these general factors applied

specifically to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and to the potential consequences for

stability and security in the region.

From that perspective, the context of a specific situation and how a state might

view the optimal use of these weapons is central to understanding the potential

application of a nuclear capability. This study will address Iraq’s perceptions of

nuclear weapons, focusing not only on the stimuli behind their development but

also on Iraq’s perspectives on nuclear strategy.This may serve as a guide to assessing

how the country’s leadership might have envisioned the use of these weapons.

Ultimately, a better understanding of these issues may help establish some lessons

learned that could also be applicable in analysis and policy making on nuclear

proliferation elsewhere.

The issue of Iraq’s pursuit of nuclear weapons needs to be approached on two

separate levels. One is Saddam’s perception of the need for and utility of nuclear

weapons in dealing with threats and his geopolitical environment. This is

unavoidably related to the second, an analysis of how Saddam might have actually

used such a capability.

x Norman Cigar
Saddam himself has to be the focal point and the key level of analysis in

understanding Iraq’s pursuit of nuclear weapons in light of his centrality in the

nation’s authoritarian system.Possibly even without Saddam,Iraq might well have

sought to acquire nuclear weapons, as has been true of a number of its regional

neighbors, such as Libya, Syria, Iran, Egypt, and Israel, with varying degrees of

commitment and success.

2 Nevertheless, without Saddam’s driving force, vision,

and commitment of resources,Iraq’s nuclear program might have taken a different

course even in light of enduring geostrategic factors.

3 His commitment to nuclear

weapons, in fact, was so consuming that he had promised Jafar Diya’ Jafar, then

director of Iraq’s nuclear program, to build a solid gold statue of him as a reward

if he succeeded.

4

One can argue as well that Saddam’s paradigms and decision-making style, at the

same time, drove Iraqi strategy and thinking on nuclear weapons. It is hard to

overestimate his personal impact, given a political culture in which he was accepted

as the reference point and validating factor for all decisions and discussions on

national strategy and security. His pronouncements were treated as definitive and

quoted on all occasions, leaving practically no room for open debate on general

goals, although on nuclear weapons, one can posit that a perceived need for a

nuclear deterrent was not limited to Saddam but was probably a more genuinely

broad-based general perception of the Iraqi political class and public. When

speaking of “Iraq” in this study, implicitly the reference will most often be to

Saddam, as the key decision maker not only in the nuclear program but on national

security matters overall.

At the same time, of course,the concentration of power in Saddam’s hands and the

narrow nature of the political circle around him makes penetrating many aspects

of thinking about Iraq’s nuclear weapons particularly difficult.

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 1

SADDAM’S HUSSEIN’S NUCLEAR VISION
THE HISTORICAL DATABASE

Reconstructing Iraqi thinking on nuclear weapons remains far from easy even

today. With the fall of the Saddam regime and the end of that country’s nuclear

program,to some extent, more information has become available about Iraq.Under

the circumstances, in fact, one might expect to have available all the information

necessary to understand the question of Saddam’s intentions thoroughly, yet the

relevant database remains incomplete. While Saddam and most of the players in

the core decision-making circle around him were arrested and questioned, even

the interrogations of the principal figures did not yield complete responses in this

regard. In fact, no one seems to have asked Saddam about his thinking on the

potential use of nuclear weapons.The monumental report by the Special Advisor

to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction

(WMD)—often known as the Duelfer Report after its main author, Charles

Duelfer5

—provides some valuable information on this score, but its main focus

was on the mechanics of the development and possession of Iraq’s WMD rather

than on strategy. Moreover, Saddam’s regime operated in this arena largely in

verbal, rather than in written, form and of the relevant documents that did exist,

many have since been destroyed.

6

One can point to no single national Iraqi strategy document,whether classified or

not, in which the role of nuclear weapons is fixed. Neither is a systematic official

record of Iraqi thinking on nuclear weapons discussing their potential employment

readily available. This is not surprising, given Iraq’s secretive system where

Saddam’s intent was often unclear even to subordinates close to the center of

power, where open debate was nonexistent, and where any public statements on

this issue were studiously opaque.While in power, Saddam revealed little about his

thinking on nuclear weapons, as was also true of his immediate entourage, and

their perceptions often have to be inferred from their limited public and private

statements and policy decisions.

Nuclear strategy can be developed in different ways. In the United States, for

example, civilian experts were largely responsible for developing doctrine in the

2 Norman Cigar
early days (especially at the strategic level), while in the Soviet Union this was

largely the preserve of the military,with the Communist Party setting the politicalmilitary parameters.

7 In Iraq, a systematic effort to institute a discussion process on

nuclear strategy and doctrine seemed to be missing, at least above the theateroperational level, although some discussion at least within the military must have

taken place in order to draft the doctrinal manuals that were produced.

Despite Saddam’s dominant presence, other actors would also have had an input

into some aspects of the country’s emerging nuclear strategy or would have been

privy to insider information because of their access.Iraq’s scientists, of course,were

intimately involved in the nuclear program, although essentially in the technical

rather than the policy aspects related to how these weapons were to be used.These

scientists have often been very forthcoming in their memoirs and interviews, and

their access to the country’s policy makers, however limited, provides useful insights

on the latter’s thinking.

The Iraqi media—whether the military media or the Ba’ath Party–dominated

civilian media—is a useful source, not so much for any hard information one can

glean from it as for being a reflection of the general atmosphere and the broad

parameters of the political context. Very often, discussions in the media were cast

in surrogate terms,with arguments made about other nuclear and would-be nuclear

powers which, however, would also illuminate Saddam’s thinking.

Only with the Iraqi military is somewhat more abundant—though still limited—

material available, with operational and doctrinal documents providing rare

glimpses into Iraqi thinking. Indeed, the Iraqi Army even produced a doctrinal

manual on how to employ nuclear weapons at the operational level. The military

documents and scattered writings in official periodicals—captured during the 1991

Gulf War and subsequently declassified—are especially valuable, despite their own

limitations, as not everything was committed to paper, preserved, or collected.

While the Iraqi military was perhaps not privy to the thinking of Saddam and the

inner leadership circle, the need to enable training and planning inevitably would

have stimulated thinking and discussions within the military to generate shared

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 3
doctrine, however preliminary and theoretical in many aspects it might be, and to

understand and prepare for the effects of nuclear weapons on the battlefield. And,

it would have been the military—given its professional expertise—that would have

been tasked eventually with implementing any nuclear strategy, no matter who

would have had the lead in developing or drafting it. Here, too, however, there is

no record of any discussions or debates.

Ultimately, our factual database on Iraq’s thinking about nuclear weapons is not

likely to expand greatly. Barring new revelations by former regime insiders or the

release of additional documents to the public, any analysis of the nuclear thinking

in Iraq must rely on consolidating an array of piecemeal information, with many

unavoidable gaps.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND THE THREAT ENVIRONMENT

SADDAM AND IRAQ’S ENEMIES

Focusing on Saddam’s own perceptions and projections is fundamental, given his

decisive role in Iraq. Understanding his view of the threat environment can help

us understand his motivation behind the pursuit of nuclear weapons and, to a

certain extent, also how he might have envisioned using a nuclear capability. In

their perceptive study,Jerrold Post and Amatzia Baram have characterized Saddam

as having a “paranoid orientation,”that is, seeing himself surrounded by enemies.

With an Iraq wedged between two powerful and hostile neighbors— Iran and

Israel—conflict was almost inevitable from his perspective.

8 Iraq had a long history

of confrontation with Israel, having participated in virtually every Arab-Israeli war,

even if only with limited forces, and Saddam was a strong supporter of the

Palestinian cause.

Likewise, Iraq experienced a stormy relationship with Iran, fueled by border

friction, competition for influence in the Persian Gulf, and tensions stemming

from the interpenetration of ethnic and sectarian communities in the two

countries, culminating in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980–88. Perhaps not surprisingly,

in light of the regional situation—according to Tariq Aziz, a senior official

4 Norman Cigar
throughout Saddam’s time in power—Saddam saw nuclear weapons as a vital

element of Iraq’s defense policy: “He wanted nuclear weapons to guarantee his

legacy and to compete with powerful antagonistic neighbors; to him, nuclear

weapons were necessary for Iraq to survive.”9

The original impetus for Iraq’s embarkation on the nuclear quest seems to have

been a perceived need for deterrence to parry these regional threats in the form of

an existing Israeli nuclear capability and what was feared to be an incipient Iranian

one beginning in the days of the Shah. Which of these perceived threats—Israel

or Iran—served as the predominant initial stimulus and subsequent focus of effort

is debatable, however.

In retrospect, individuals who were privy to the thinking of the country’s leadership

are still divided in this respect.In the view of one nuclear scientist,Imad Khadduri,

for example, Iraq’s nuclear weapons were to be used mainly as a deterrent against

Israel, even during the Iran-Iraq War. He notes,“this was confirmed to us during

brain-storming sessions . . . led by Humam Abd Al-Khaliq at the Iraqi Nuclear

Energy Agency’s sessions while we heard Iranian rockets falling close by.”10

Another nuclear scientist, Asad Al-Khafaji, for his part, believed that Saddam’s

intention was really not to use nuclear weapons against Israel, despite what Saddam

had said on occasion, but rather against Iran, the other Gulf countries, and even

against dissident Iraqis.

11 Based on official statements and media coverage, one

could safely conclude that both threats played a significant role.

IRAN

Staff Major General Wafiq Al-Samarra’i, who eventually became chief of Iraq’s

military intelligence, contends that Iraq’s nuclear program had been spurred by

that of Iran.

12While an Israeli airstrike put Iraq’s reactor at Osirak/Tuwaytha out

of commission in 1981,Iran clearly also saw the same reactor as a direct threat to

itself and had previously launched ten airstrikes against it, with only one being

even partially successful.

13

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 5
The state-controlled Iraqi media, for its part, no doubt reflecting Saddam’s

concerns, devoted as much attention to the potential Iranian as to the actual Israeli

nuclear threat, highlighting one or the other at certain junctures depending on the

current situation. In fact, Iran’s nuclear threat remained an abiding concern for

Baghdad even after Iran had been defeated in the Iran-Iraq War. For example,

under a heading entitled “Nuclear Weapons,” a 1990 assessment by the Iraqi

Army’s Chemical Directorate expressed concern that Iran might acquire a nuclear

reactor from Hungary or Rumania.

14

One Iraqi journalist,who ascribed aggressive intentions to Tehran,typically fretted

that the latter might acquire support for the development of nuclear weapons from

the newly independent Central Asian countries and asked rhetorically, “Has the

Iranian regime’s mind weakened to the point that it has also forgotten its bitter and

costly experience during the eight-year war?”15 Saddam was to feel particularly

vulnerable after the crippling effects of the Gulf War and its aftermath on Iraq’s

nuclear program, especially as he perceived Iran as still intent on acquiring a

nuclear capability of its own.Iraqi observers even imputed an alleged United States

silence on Iran’s nuclear intentions as a means of rewarding the latter for having

supported the Shi’a revolt in Iraq in the wake of the Gulf War.

16

ISRAEL

At the same time,Iraq was also worried about Israel’s nuclear capability, as reflected

by the significant preponderance of writing about the latter by the late 1980s.This

was not surprising, since Israel already had nuclear weapons and represented an

actual threat, as well as being engaged in an escalating confrontation with Iraq by

1990. Indeed, Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons in and of itself came to be

seen in Baghdad as more than sufficient justification for Iraq to pursue the

same path.

A premise of a justified symmetric response seemed to have acquired permanent

validity, and even elicited open support in unguarded moments in public or in

closed circles. According to Saddam, for example, “I believe the Arabs have the

6 Norman Cigar
right to possess any weapon which their enemy has.”17 This sense of entitlement

remained deeply seated, as illustrated by Iraq’s Minister of Culture (and former

head of the Iraqi Nuclear Energy Agency) Humam Abd Al-Khaliq’s response,

when asked in 1998 about the impact of Pakistan’s newly announced nuclear

weapons:“They have nothing to do with the objectives of the Arab nation.I believe

that the only weapon that can serve the Arabs in their confrontation against the

expansionist policy of the Zionist entity and the threat posed by its arsenal of

nuclear and strategic weapons is their own weapon.”18

DID THE OSIRAK AIRSTRIKE TRIGGER THE MILITARY

NUCLEAR PROGRAM?

It is impossible to pinpoint any single defining event in Iraq’s relations with Israel

or Iran which would have spurred Saddam to embark on the road to nuclear

weapons. Conventional wisdom identifies the Israeli airstrike against the Iraqi

nuclear reactor which the French had installed at Osirak in June 1981 as the

catalyst that supposedly induced Saddam to begin a military nuclear program.

According to this view, he was motivated to do so out of frustration with the

thwarting of Iraq’s peaceful nuclear program and the perceived need to develop

nuclear weapons as a shield to protect such a peaceful program in the future. Some

Iraqis have also promoted this thesis.

19

However,the old Soviet government,for its part, had harbored suspicions all along

that what Iraq really wanted was an atom bomb. Early on, the Soviets articulated

a policy of not providing any support in the nuclear field that Iraq could have

diverted to military purposes when the latter approached the Kremlin for help.

Even at the time of the first nuclear bilateral deal in 1959 when Iraq received a

small reactor, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev reportedly had warned his

subordinates, “First the Chinese, and now even the Arabs are asking for a bomb.

In the final analysis, it will come back to haunt us. Go ahead, cooperate with them,

but don’t give them the bomb!”20 When Saddam, then still vice president, visited

the Soviet Union in 1975 seeking a more advanced nuclear reactor, Moscow

insisted that international controls be made a condition for any new equipment,

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 7
whereupon Saddam apparently demurred and no deal was reached. After this

unsuccessful visit, the Iraqi government turned instead to France for help in

this domain.

21

Moreover, there are indications that a weapons-oriented effort, or planning for

such an effort, had already been in the works prior to the Osirak airstrike.Nuclear

scientist Husayn Al-Shahristani,for example, identifies 1979 as the turning point,

as that was the year Saddam assumed power and realigned the efforts of the nuclear

program from a peaceful focus to a military one with the establishment of a new

“Strategic Program.”22 Al-Shahristani, moreover, notes that while he was in prison

in June 1980,Barzan, Saddam’s brother and the head of intelligence, and Abd AlRazzaq Al-Hashimi, director of the Nuclear Energy Agency, approached him and

offered to set him free if he would work on a project to develop an Iraqi

atom bomb.

23

In addition, information had become available to the Soviet government that Iraq

was already covertly working on a nuclear weapons program before the Osirak

airstrike, and Soviet estimates at the time were that Iraq could use the plutonium

from the French reactor to build a bomb by the early 1980s, with three bombs by

1983 and five by 1985.

24What the strike on the Osirak reactor did do was perhaps

to stiffen Saddam’s resolve and to commit him to a greater effort.

25

THE UNITED STATES AS A THREAT?

Saddam eventually would come to see nuclear weapons as being useful in parrying

a perceived threat from the United States and in Iraq’s dealings with its nonnuclear

neighbors, as will be seen below. As Saddam told visiting Japanese journalists in

October 1990, the Soviet Union’s influence was no longer what it had been, and

in the resulting unipolar system, “we are calling for the appearance of [other]

centers of influence able to balance America’s out-of-control influence around

the world.

26

The Iraqis were keen students of the impact of nuclear weapons in other parts of

the world and, as one Iraqi observer noted with approval in 1991, China’s

8 Norman Cigar
acquisition of nuclear weapons had given the latter a way to balance both the

United States and the Soviet Union, concluding, “this may lead [China] to the

horizon of a more welcoming age in which a sense of a reassuring level of security

will be solidified within acceptable levels of weapons.”27 Iraq also looked to India’s

achievements in this area with undisguised envy. As the Iraqi Army’s newspaper

noted concerning India’s expanding nuclear activity,“Most of the countries of the

Third World and of the Nonaligned Movement viewed India’s efforts for

independence in its nuclear power far from any Western umbrella or tutelage with

satisfaction and admiration. . . . In other words, the Indian atomic bomb was a

practical indication of the potential of the Third World and of the assertion of

its will.”28

Ultimately, from Iraq’s perspective, there was no substitute for having one’s own

nuclear deterrent. Of course, in any case, no other state was willing to provide a

nuclear umbrella, including the Soviet Union, which had been reluctant to do so

even for Middle Eastern countries that had closer ties to Moscow than was the case

with Iraq.As the Ba’ath Party’s theoretical journal,Al-Thawra al-arabiya (The Arab

Revolution), stressed in an article devoted to deterrence: “Deterrence provided by

other countries is of doubtful credibility, as there is no country which would

sacrifice its own people and cities for the sake of another people in the terrible

nuclear shadow.”29

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AS A LEGITIMIZING VEHICLE

From a political perspective, acquiring nuclear weapons could also be viewed as a

potent vehicle for Saddam to mobilize public support to help legitimize his regime,

burnish his personal image as leader at home, and enhance his regional standing.

Specifically, attaining the status of a nuclear power would have been both a means

of providing credible security for the nation and, at the same time, a major

accomplishment in science and technology that Saddam could claim as his own.

As such, it was in Saddam’s interest that various domestic and regional

constituencies at least be aware that nuclear weapons were being developed.

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 9
REACHING THE DOMESTIC AUDIENCE

Although Saddam’s personal role in promoting Iraq’s nuclear program was clearly

paramount, he also sought to generate and take advantage of broad-based support

from key sectors of the Iraqi political system and society. Protecting one’s country

successfully could be expected to elicit support in any political culture.By defining

the threat, often reflecting perceptions based on widely held beliefs and on

enduring geostrategic factors, Saddam could expect to find a ready audience in

Iraq, as well as throughout the Arab world, where a deep-seated frustration with

what was viewed as humiliating impotence in the face of Israeli aggression or an

Iranian quest for regional hegemony existed.

The state-controlled Iraqi media incessantly drew attention to this general threat

situation and emphasized the nuclear threat to the nation in order to mobilize

support for the country’s own nuclear weapons program as a response. However,

such publicity could backfire by placing the regime in the awkward position of

seeming to be weak if it did nothing to address the challenge it had helped elevate

in the media. A failure to meet an implicit commitment to correct the power gap

continually highlighted by the regime could have proved embarrassing.

IRAQ’S MILITARY

First, support could be expected to be forthcoming from Iraq’s military. The

military was an especially important constituency for Saddam, not only as a major

tool of his foreign and domestic policy, but also as the most likely source of coup

attempts. Appeals to their nationalism and professional pride could have been an

effective way to shore up their loyalty, as they would have benefited from the

additional funding, prestige, and responsibilities emanating from a nuclear arsenal.

The military apparently keenly felt the need to redress the regional power balance.

As Staff Major General Wafiq Al-Samarra’i remarked about confronting Iran’s

nuclear plans, even after his defection from Saddam’s Iraq,“If we, the Gulf Arabs,

did not have a strategic deterrence force, that would have been a form of suicide,”

and he rued the fact that all the blame for pursuing a nuclear capability had fallen

on Saddam, who was only trying to “fill this gap in the strategic balance.”30

10 Norman Cigar
The regime no doubt would have taken advantage of the acquisition of nuclear

weapons for maximum political gain with the military in a manner similar to its

previous exploitation of the achievements in the field of missile technology. To

take just one analogous example, an internal recruitment poster seeking technical

personnel to serve in the new Missile Branch appealed to the military’s patriotism

and highlighted Saddam’s accomplishment by promising recruits that they could

now play a part in “attaining victory over imperialism and Zionism and raise Iraq’s

banner high under the leadership of our awesome pillar, Saddam Husayn.”31

THE BA’ATH PARTY

The ruling Ba’ath Party, including its structure within the military, reinforced the

sense of entitlement to Iraq’s possession and use of WMD.Not only was Saddam’s

claim to the effect of “I consider that the Arabs have the right to possess any

weapon that their enemy possesses” made one of the teaching points in a Ba’ath

Party manual intended as a guide for Ba’ath political officers in the military, but so

was the manual’s conclusion. It declared that Iraq had a right to use any such

weapons—at least the chemical weapons then on hand—to counter the nuclear

weapons of “a party [that is, Israel] which continuously picks quarrels with and

threatens the Arab Nation and Iraq.”32 The Party’s legitimacy clearly would have

been enhanced if Iraq succeeded in acquiring nuclear weapons.

IRAQ’S SCIENTISTS

Iraq’s large scientific community was also a natural bureaucratic ally because of the

material benefits and professional prestige that would accrue to its members,

although they might express this in patriotic terms. 33

IRAQ’S PUBLIC AND STUDENTS

Although gauging public opinion in a regime as closed as that of Saddam’s would

have been difficult, most Iraqis would probably have been pleased for their country

to achieve a nuclear power status. According to one Iraqi nuclear scientist, the

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 11
nuclear program was “very popular with most Iraqis,” who viewed its existence

most frequently in terms of being a counterweight to Israel.

34

One potentially disruptive subset of the public—the student population—was

specifically targeted by using news of achievements in the nuclear field. Lectures

by officials to members in the obligatory Iraqi Students’ Union would frequently

hint that a nuclear bomb was being developed, and most students seemed proud

that Iraq would soon become a “great power”(quwwa udhma) and that “America

will fear us.” 35

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND THE DEFENSE

OF THE ARAB NATION

In many ways, Saddam also envisaged the wider Arab public as part of his natural

constituency. Arrogating to himself the right to speak on behalf of all Arabs, he

consistently portrayed threats to, and successes by, Iraq as applying to the Arab

world as a whole. On a personal psychological level,Saddam saw himself as the heir

to Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arab leadership role—and for Saddam that also

meant having nuclear weapons, which he felt were a key capability of major

leaders.

36 Arab unity had always been one of the keystone principles of the regime’s

Ba’athist ideology, and such an appeal could thereby also garner greater legitimacy

for Saddam within Party circles.

In a keynote address he delivered to the senior commanders of the Iraqi Armed

Forces on 26 April 1990, Saddam himself had stressed that “the enemies of Iraq

are also the enemies of the [Arab] Nation” and maintained that “the essential basis

for defense is not local [qutri] but national [qawmi],” that is, Arab-wide rather

than just Iraqi.

37 Indeed, for him, any sacrifice that Iraq made was just “the price

for the ascent of the entire [Arab] Nation and not just of Iraq.”38 And, as Saddam

concluded, “Iraq is destined to be the core of the Nation [umma] at a historic

moment, which is a great honor.”39 Characteristically, the Iraqi Ba’ath Party’s

theoretical journal could appeal both to the pride of its Iraqi members and of the

wider Arab public on this level when it stated that a key step in ensuring the

12 Norman Cigar
security of the Arab nation was “to depend on the national proclamation by the

Comrade Leader [that is, Saddam] . . . as a comprehensive guide and as the logic

for an Arab security strategy and for combined national action.”40

In that light, Saddam could claim to be providing protection to the entire Arab

world from the common threat,with Iraq as a counterweight to Israel and Iran.For

example,the Iraqi armed forces’ open-media journal reminded Arab readers,“Iraq

was able to destroy the center of the main threat, a great threat, to Arab national

security, namely the Iranian threat.”41 Moreover, being able to showcase such an

achievement as an atom bomb would have tapped into an enduring sense of

unfairness at both a government and popular level throughout the Arab world

stemming from a perceived double standard of the West’s turning a blind eye to

Israel’s nuclear arsenal while prohibiting the Arabs from pursuing a similar

capability. Saddam could interpret the reported offer by Saudi Arabia’s King Khalid

to finance the rebuilding of Iraq’s reactor after the Israeli raid in 1981 (although

the French ultimately refused a new contract) as a tangible sign of such potential

solidarity.

42 Later, according to press accounts, Saudi Arabia did help finance the

Iraqi nuclear weapons program to the amount of $5 billion.

43

At times, Saddam seemed to offer—albeit in vague terms—a security umbrella to

the other Arabs, at least with the binary chemical weapons already in Iraq’s arsenal,

which suggests that this guarantee might later also have been extended to Iraq’s

future nuclear weapons.

44 The Ba’ath Party’s official journal already assumed that

Saddam was succeeding in ensuring security and success for all the Arabs,

emphasizing that he had “an encompassing vision” on Arab security, “which will

guarantee Arab unity of effort and the mobilization of forces in order to return

the Arabs to their golden age and to their leading role in building human

civilization.”45

Given his ingrained penchant for rigid personal aggrandizement and centralized

control over military and political decision making, it is highly unlikely that

Saddam would have shared any of Iraq’s nuclear technology—which could be

traced easily—with terrorist groups or with other regional states. Such sharing

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 13
could have led to a loss of his personal control and to potentially unwanted

confrontations with other states.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND MODERNITY

In a less tangible way, acquiring nuclear weapons would also have represented for

Saddam a confirmation of his regime’s success in achieving modernity and power.

Success in the nuclear field would have been seen as recognition of Iraq’s

membership in a privileged circle of countries and as the very symbol of national

development.

Not surprisingly, the official Iraqi position was that the acquisition of the atom

bomb was at the top of the list of Israel’s technical achievements in the military

field.

46The Iraqi media viewed nuclear power as uniquely important, portraying the

Israeli raid on the Osirak reactor as “a clear-cut preemptive strike against a

technological project which, if it had been fulfilled and had developed,would have

eliminated the Zionist plan” to achieve its technological-industrial hegemony in

the region in the 21st century.

47 In that light, Saddam could claim with conviction

that Iraq’s enemies were already disconcerted that Iraq had developed the

technological, scientific, and military power to implement its political will.

48

Indeed, linking science to political power, the Ba’ath Party’s theoretical journal

claimed that the main reason why Israel had attacked Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981

was that Israel was anxious to prevent the Arabs from “acquiring any scientific or

technical knowledge,” since “the Zionists believe that this is the only means by

which they can impose their will on the Arab nation.”49

As one might expect, the Baghdad regime could, and did, use technical successes

for propaganda routinely to its advantage, providing material for sycophantic praise

in the local media, as in one Iraqi newspaper, which heralded such achievements

with typical hyperbole: “The successes which the mujahidin in military

industrialization achieve and which have raised Iraq to a high level of development

and scientific and industrial technology have become the object of wonder for the

[Arab] Nation’s sons and their security refuge, enabling them to enter genuinely

14 Norman Cigar
into this advanced era and to create a balance of power vis-à-vis covetous

aggressors.”50 The military press,for its part,was also bursting with pride as a result

of the country’s new weapons developments, claiming,“Iraq has broken the barrier

of underdevelopment and achieved what was considered in the category

of miracles.”51

Saddam’s achievements in this field could also compensate for any feelings of

national inferiority toward the West stemming from Iraq’s past underdevelopment.

In a 1990 speech in which he focused on the achievements of Iraq’s military

industry,for example, Saddam claimed that outside enemies “treat us as if we were

Third World countries.” Admitting an element of truth to that perception, he

noted that indeed “there are still many people who go barefoot, not because they

do not have shoes but because they are backward, and there are still many of our

people who do not have bathrooms.”52 However, he stressed,“our people have the

will to progress and the determination to achieve progress even if we are Third

World countries.”53 By the late 1980s, nuclear power began to be included in

standard Iraqi propaganda iconography. One particular poster shows

representations of the Babylonian past juxtaposed with Saddam in uniform, with

a prominent atomic symbol as the link, vividly portraying nuclear power as the

crowning achievement equal to those of the country’s ancient civilization.

Saddam could also appeal to the broader Arab public on the issue of modernity.For

the state-controlled Iraqi media, in fact, Iraq’s achievements in technology were

the litmus test for its assumption of the leading role in the Arab world. As one

newspaper editor put it, “Iraq, since the 1970s, has stood out as the country of

choice to become the natural center [of the Arab world] . . . the one most capable

of achieving industrial and technological progress.”54

TO HIDE OR REVEAL?

Saddam had to balance touting advances in the nuclear field with the need for

plausible denial; he could hint at the future only in oblique terms while, at least

officially,seeking to deny to the very end that Iraq was pursuing nuclear weapons.

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 15
According to one former Iraqi nuclear scientist, Saddam had developed

considerable skill in using indirect language to communicate Iraq’s impending

nuclear capability to Iraqi military officers and to the rulers of the neighboring

Gulf states.

55 For example, in a speech on 1 April 1990 to the General Command

of the Armed Forces, he claimed,“Condensers (mukaththifat) costing [only] 10,500

dinars are all that is needed to build a nuclear bomb.”56Yet at the Geneva meeting

with U.S. Secretary of State James Baker in the immediate run-up to the start of

Operation Desert Storm, Tariq Aziz, Iraq’s foreign minister, felt compelled to

claim,“As for fears, doubts, and allegations about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities,we are

a country which is signatory to the nonproliferation treaty. Our very humble

installations are subject to constant inspection.”57 For his part, Egypt’s President

Husni Mubarak, who felt deceived by Saddam’s dissimulation to him before his

invasion of Kuwait, would later remember with irony how Saddam made empty

boasts to him:“He would tell you, ‘I have nuclear weapons,’ even though he didn’t

have nuclear weapons; he had zilch.”58

Although the nuclear program was highly classified, at least those in the upper

echelons of the Iraqi government,the military, and the scientific community would

have been aware of it directly. And the public would at least have suspected that

such a project existed, given the frequent related discussions in the media and

public knowledge of the Osirak reactor that had been struck. Indeed, the sheer

size of the nuclear program would have made its complete secrecy difficult

notwithstanding Iraq’s closed system, since the program had some

20,000 employees.

59

Even an Iraqi military magazine from May 1990 could not resist showing a photo

of Saddam posing with krytrons—suspected triggers for nuclear weapons—whose

controversial covert purchase abroad by Iraq had recently caused belated

international concern about the country’s nuclear program. The photo

accompanied a summary of a recent speech by Saddam in which he had refused

to accede to foreign pressure to abandon his nuclear program, declaring defiantly,

“Should we back down on the new hallmark of patriotism,which is technological

16 Norman Cigar
and scientific development? . . . Anyone who would abandon the line of industry

related to technological and scientific development in his country would also

abandon his patriotism.”60 Although no explicit linkage was made between the

photo and the article, the implication of their juxtaposition was clear: Saddam

would continue to pursue the nuclear program despite any international opposition.

As a result of such hints and leaks, even a senior military officer could conclude that

by 1990 “many civilians and military believed that we had a nuclear weapon or

something similar.”61

WERE THERE ANY SKEPTICS?

Any overt Iraqi opposition to Saddam’s pursuit of nuclear weapons or to their

possible use in war seems to have been absent. Naturally, critics would have found

it imprudent to voice doubts openly even if they had harbored them, and anyone

who declined to work on the nuclear weapons program might be punished, as was

the case with the nuclear scientist Husayn Al-Shahristani,who spent more than a

decade in prison after he had commented to Saddam in 1979 that the latter’s

decision to pursue nuclear weapons would lead to problems for the Iraqis.

62

Nevertheless, even within the military one could find isolated skeptics expressing

reservations, however veiled their thinking might be.For example, in the files of the

3rd Armored Division, there is a handwritten text—either the text for a briefing

or the transcript recorded from a briefing by an Iraqi general—entitled “The

Dangers of Nuclear Radiation.”63 The thrust is a broad-based critique of nuclear

war, with the author using as vehicles the Israeli-South African cooperation in

testing a nuclear weapon in 1979 and the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986.

The author notes,“The problem with this [Israeli-South African] cooperation is

not that it represents a threat [only] to the security of the countries of the Third

World, in which these two states are located geographically, but rather that it

threatens the security of the entire world.”64 Indeed, rather than emphasizing the

conventional argument of the unfairness of the exclusivity promoted by the Great

Powers,the author holds that “The horizontal proliferation of nuclear weapons to

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 17
small states which have not been considered nuclear states,such as Israel,Pakistan,

Argentina, and South Africa, will increase the nuclear danger to which the world

is exposed, since the entry of any new country into the nuclear club will certainly

increase tensions and may in itself be the cause of conflict.”65

In addition, he expresses his concern about the possibility that such small nucleararmed states could drag their patrons into a nuclear confrontation on their behalf:

“Likewise, the ideological links between such small states and the Great Powers

may force the latter to intervene to help the former, thus initiating a total nuclear

war between the Great Powers.”66

In particular, the author addresses the danger of radiation that would result from

a nuclear war, highlighting the case of the defective reactor at Chernobyl in support

of his argument. He concludes, “There is only one sure means to protect against

the dangers of radiation, namely to avoid being exposed to it. This makes the

imperative of avoiding an outbreak of a nuclear war an urgent and absolute

requirement for all of humanity.”67 Despite the author’s politically correct explicit

focus on Israel and South Africa, his implicit critique of the use, or even possession,

of nuclear weapons by any state—including aspiring minor powers—appears to

be exceptionally bold given the prevailing atmosphere and direction at the time

in Iraq.

IRAQI PERSPECTIVES ON NUCLEAR DETERRENCE

CONTRASTING WESTERN ACADEMIC FRAMEWORKS

Traditionally, one of the principal—if not the principal—perceived benefits of

nuclear weapons has been their utility as a strategic deterrent, leading to stability,

as was said to have been the case throughout the Cold War. That is, the Soviet

and American nuclear arsenals were seen as having created the basis for mutual

deterrence and, as a corollary, this had led to the avoidance of major conventional

war between the two countries and caution in regional crises, out of fear that a

confrontation could escalate to an uncontrollable and unwanted full-scale nuclear

exchange.The guiding assumption of this view has often been that the acquisition

18 Norman Cigar
of nuclear weapons by multiple countries, including those in the Middle East,

would lead to a benign replication of the earlier experience between the United

States and the Soviet Union. Thus, nuclear proliferation was to be viewed in

positive terms, leading to increased stability among countries with symmetric

nuclear arsenals, since these states would seek to avoid war out of fear of the

potential triggering of an unthinkable nuclear holocaust.

68

Such neorealist, or optimist, views were injected into national debates as U.S. policy

on Iraq was being considered. For example, former National Security Adviser

Zbigniew Brzezinski, in arguing against a military option after Iraq’s invasion of

Kuwait, had already raised the analogy between the ability to deter a nuclear Iraq

and the United States’ successful experience with the Soviet Union.

69 This

underlying premise was noticeably persistent,resurfacing in debates in the United

States preceding the 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom, with opponents of the war

using the argument that Iraq could be expected to behave as responsibly as the

Soviet Union had with any WMD.

70

A countering pessimist view suggests that the role of nuclear weapons was a less

significant factor in the preservation of peace during the Cold War, and stresses

instead the complexity and ambiguity of the historical record and the instability of

the deterrence experience even during that era.

71 Or, even when accepting the more

traditional view of the earlier period, skeptics have been less sanguine about the

possibility of replicating such a phenomenon elsewhere in the post-Cold War era,

pointing to the significance of the specific context of the Cold War.

72 Some have

highlighted the differences specifically for the Middle East, calling into question

the validity of the deterrence analogy for that region.

73

WHAT IS NUCLEAR DETERRENCE: THE IRAQI VIEW

Saddam, and Iraqi spokesmen in general, addressed frequently the need to deter

actual and potential enemies and saw the establishment of a nuclear-induced peace

as a possibility. The assumption of the positive outcome of deterrence has been

surprisingly resilient in Iraqi thinking, and even recently one Iraqi nuclear scientist

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 19
promoted the idea of a nuclear balance as a means of maintaining peace in the

Middle East, based on his interpretation of the Cold War experience and of the

India-Pakistan situation.

74

Other Iraqis, however, placed a greater focus on the possibility of actually

employing nuclear weapons in combat.The disagreement was more apparent than

real, as even those emphasizing deterrence still not only envisioned the likelihood

of continued conflict at lower levels but also seemed to accept a continuum of

conflict potentially leading to nuclear war.In a way,Iraqis at times seemed to still

be grappling with this concept’s boundaries, not in a real debate, but simply in

putting forth their views when addressing specific geopolitical situations, and

probably had not yet articulated a cohesive or officially sanctioned approach to

this issue.

Saddam himself seemed to share in these contradictions. At times, he had hinted

at the possibility of mutual deterrence leading to peace if Iraq acquired nuclear

weapons.In an interview with an American reporter in 1991, he argued,“You [that

is, the United States] were the first to acquire them [nuclear weapons] and know

how complicated they are. How would it be if this or that state were able to take

a similar step and develop nuclear bombs? If we had the atom bomb, that might

facilitate peace and the elimination of WMD and, as a result, allow people to live

securely.” And, he even made the fanciful suggestion that the United States “lend

us some [nuclear] bombs, which might facilitate peace in the Middle East.”75

Pointing to the U.S.-Soviet example of mutual deterrence, Saddam went so far as

to suggest that the international community should say to the Arabs, “Take a

[nuclear] weapon so that you can use it to confront the Zionist threat from atom

bombs and thus prevent the Zionist entity from using atom bombs against the

Arabs.” According to Saddam,“that way, the world will avoid the dangers which

result from using atom bombs in wars.” Admittedly, Saddam was sensitive to the

fact that this argument might sound merely like a rationale for Iraq’s acquisition

of its own nuclear weapons, and protested somewhat lamely, saying, “This is

20 Norman Cigar
just logic, not an excuse for the Arabs to acquire nuclear technology for

military purposes.”76

WOULD DETERRENCE OF SADDAM HAVE WORKED?

Even under ideal circumstances,the conduct of mutual deterrence is far from easy,

and the related instances of brinkmanship and the ability to control escalation—

whether done frequently or not—require a high level of accompanying political

skill and strategic vision to make effective use of nuclear deterrence to achieve one’s

objectives without going to war.

SADDAM’S BRINKSMANSHIP

There are legitimate doubts about whether Saddam possessed the necessary skills

to successfully engage in brinksmanship, based on his miscalculations in decision

making and judging from his crude attempts at deterrence in those instances when

he did seek to use the existing capabilities he had—chemical and biological

weapons—for that purpose. His decision to initiate a full-scale war against Iran in

1980, his invasion of (and even more so his refusal to leave) Kuwait in 1990–91,

and his decision to stay and fight a U.S. administration intent on replacing his

regime in 2003 all revealed major flaws in his assessment and decisionmaking processes.

At the same time, from his perspective, inflammatory language and threats of

escalation were at the heart of successful deterrence. He expressed such

destabilizing views in a speech to the senior officers of the Iraqi Armed Forces on

26 April 1990: “The Arab nation has become accustomed to diplomatic language

or,to be more precise,to wishy-washy language.What is needed instead is language

that will bash in the enemy’s head and make it bleed,so that the Arabs see this for

themselves and believe that there is no one who can throw even a stone at Iraq.”77

To be sure, Saddam successfully deterred Israel in 1990 thanks to a new capability

of binary chemical weapons to be delivered by the extended-range Scud surfaceto-missiles (the Al-Husayn), as he threatened to “burn half of Israel”to deter the

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 21
latter from attacking Iraq’s developing nuclear infrastructure.

78However,this may

have been only an unstable and illusory short-term respite, given the two countries’

seemingly irreconcilable policies. According to two analysts who assessed the

situation at the time, given Israel’s adamant stated insistence that no other regional

state could be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons and Iraq’s resolve to continue its

program to do so,“by mid-1990 the Israeli-Iraqi showdown over the nuclear issue

appeared to be just a matter of time.”79 Moreover, with threats such as these,

Saddam would place himself in a corner and reduce his scope for maneuver, with

his credibility at stake, not so much with regional and international audiences as

with his domestic one. For example, he had apparently pronounced this threat

against Israel not only for foreign consumption, but had also expressed the same

position to key domestic sectors,such as to the General Command of the Armed

Forces.

80 Failing to follow through with such threats could mean a risky loss of

face within important sectors of his security apparatus. As it was, this event also

raised his profile as a dangerous and irresponsible threat to regional and international stability.

Perhaps a key question is whether the course of events would have been different

if Saddam had waited until Iraq had acquired nuclear weapons—even if he

demonstrated only a single nuclear device publicly—before invading Kuwait and

had then engaged in deterrence. Many Iraqis certainly believe so in retrospect.

Mahdi Obeidi, one of Saddam’s top nuclear scientists, for example, calls into

question Saddam’s acuity based on this episode, noting that if the latter had really

wanted to have nuclear weapons as a deterrent to a U.S. invasion, it would have

made far more sense to wait before invading Kuwait until he had such a capability

in hand.

81Obeidi, in fact, based on this key misjudgment, explicitly taxed Saddam

as “not a rational strategist.”82 Staff Major General Wafiq Al-Samarra’i, then

deputy director of Military Intelligence, likewise stressed that the outcome over

Kuwait might have been different had Saddam waited a year until Iraq had

exploded its first nuclear device—as Al-Samarra’i was convinced it would have

done—and concluded, “This was one of the Iraqi regime’s—and of Saddam

Husayn’s—mistakes, the mistake of a lifetime.”83

22 Norman Cigar
DETERRING THE UNITED STATES

The perception that nuclear weapons could deter the United States was also the

view at the highest policy levels in Iraq. It seems that Saddam had long before

internalized an assumption that Iraq could deter the United States even with a

small nuclear arsenal. According to Jafar Diya’Jafar, Saddam had told him during

a meeting in 1981 that, if Iraq possessed nuclear weapons, this would serve “as a

deterrent against attacks by Israel and by those who protect the state of Israel and

who give it continuous backing and support [that is, the United States.]”84 Given

this paradigm, Husayn Kamil’s (Iraq’s former minister of military industry) report

of exaggerated progress in the nuclear program—by telling Saddam a few days

after the invasion of Kuwait that the enrichment of uranium for nuclear weapons

would occur soon—may have influenced Saddam’s decision making during the

subsequent confrontation with the international community, making him more

willing to take risks.

85

According to a senior Iraqi military officer from the Saddam era, after the Gulf

War, Saddam’s son Udayy told him and other senior officers that not having waited

until Iraq had nuclear weapons before invading Kuwait had been a major mistake,

implying that he believed the outcome in such a case would have been different,

and perhaps suggesting that Iraq—were it ever to have acquired nuclear weapons—

would have been even more prone to similar risky adventures, believing the

outcome would be different thanks to this new capability.

86

In the case of the Gulf War, one can posit that, at the very least, the United States

would have done considerably more soul-searching and had had more intense

debate on the appropriate course of action,with perhaps constraints on its freedom

of action in responding to the invasion of Kuwait. Perhaps more significantly,

nonnuclear countries in the region, including the pivotal state of Saudi Arabia,

whose cooperation was vital for an effective U.S.response, could well have proven

to be the critical vulnerability in the United States’ strategy. Had Saudi Arabia

been reluctant to provide access and support for a large-scale U.S. deployment that

might have risked angering a nuclear-armed Saddam—and Saudi permission was

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 23
far from automatic initially in any case—U.S. planning and operations would have

been complicated exponentially.

SADDAM’S ATTEMPTS AT DETERRENCE

When Saddam tried to play his deterrence card during the 1991 Gulf War, he did

so poorly.It appears from a captured audio tape,reproduced in part in the Duelfer

Report, that during a closed-door meeting with his inner circle in January 1991,

Saddam had ordered or had intended to order the potential use of biological and

chemical weapons against Saudi and Israeli cities, as well as against U.S. troop

concentrations.

87 Reportedly, launch authority had even been delegated to field

commanders, but only in case of a U.S. nuclear strike on Baghdad and the

incapacitation of the central leadership.

88

Yet, surprisingly, Saddam does not seem to have exploited this possibility for

deterrence. He did spell out in an unrelated interview in June 1990 one of the “red

lines”that would have triggered a chemical response against Israel, namely if the

latter first used chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons against Iraq, whereupon

Iraqi missile and air bases had orders to launch retaliatory strikes with chemical

weapons.

89 However, the broader potential threat was not communicated clearly

during the Gulf crisis to Iraq’s adversaries—which is a necessary condition for

deterrence to work—as Saddam made no effort verbally, through third parties, or

by detectable activity on the ground to suggest such a possibility.Attempts by Iraq

to try its hand at deterrence seemed vague and isolated and were focused on lowlevel press articles. For example, one possible attempt during the Gulf War at

hinting at the use of WMD by Iraq may have come in a statement by Iraqi

Minister of Defense General Sadi Abbas Tuma to the Iraqi News Agency, in early

February 1991, which was then carried in the Jordanian press buried in the back

pages.According to General Tuma,the Iraqi armed forces had many weapons, and

“some of these effective weapons have not been used yet,” but the language was

opaque and the message was far from clear.

90

24 Norman Cigar
A MORE AGGRESSIVE IRAQI PERSPECTIVE: “OFFENSIVE DETERRENCE”

Although nuclear deterrence is usually viewed as being a defensive strategy,Iraqis

also focused on a more aggressive form of deterrence,whereby a nuclear capability

would provide a shield for a country to act aggressively and impose its will on

others, whether on a nuclear peer or a nonnuclear power. Even those Iraqis who

accepted the effectiveness of nuclear deterrence focused on using that concept as

a vehicle to achieve potentially destabilizing political objectives. This could be

accomplished either by wielding nuclear-based political clout without combat

(useful primarily when directed against nonnuclear actors) or as a supporting effort

to conventional or unconventional combat.

OFFENSIVE DETERRENCE AND CHANGING THE STATUS QUO

Rather than a tool for reinforcing stability and the regional status quo, many Iraqis

viewed nuclear weapons as an asset allowing for a more assertive policy challenging

that status quo. Significantly, Saddam’s brother Barzan, at the time in charge of

Iraq’s Ministry of the Interior, no doubt reflecting sentiments expressed by Saddam

and prevalent within the ruling elite, felt that the power which flowed from Iraq’s

possession of nuclear weapons would be sufficient to alter the political balance in

the region. As early as 1980, he had confided to Husayn Al-Shahristani, the Iraqi

nuclear scientist who was then in prison and who he was trying to woo back into

the weapons program, that “Iraq is resolved in no uncertain terms to develop its

military nuclear capabilities because that will give it the power to redraw the map

of the region.”91 In fact, in the opinion of Jafar Diya’Jafar, Saddam wanted nuclear

weapons to turn Iraq into a regional power and to facilitate spreading his version

of Ba’athism to the other Arab countries.

92

WIELDING POLITICAL CLOUT THROUGH OFFENSIVE DETERRENCE

Iraqis had long interpreted others’use of nuclear weapons as a way to impose their

will to the detriment of Iraq’s or the Arab world’s interests. Linking deterrence to

the appearance of nuclear weapons after World War II, one study in the Ba’ath

Party’s official theoretical organ noted that other states used this strategy as a

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 25
means to “achieve their political objectives that are hostile to or that run counter

to Arab interests or to thwart any strategic move designed to fulfill the liberation

of the Arab nation and the establishment of the latter’s unified power enabling it

to defend its national security.”93 Acknowledging “traditional”defensive deterrence,

the same author contrasted the latter version of deterrence to its converse, labeled

“offensive deterrence”(rad hujumi),which facilitated the wielding of political clout

to “prevent an adversary from opposing an action that the [deterring] state wanted

to undertake.”94

In some ways, in fact,Iraqi perceptions of Israel’s nuclear strategy seemed to have

shaped Iraq’s own embryonic thinking on deterrence. The underlying premise in

Baghdad was that Israel, thanks to its nuclear monopoly, could seek to impose a

“peace by deterrence” (salam al-rad) or a “nuclear peace” (al-salam al-nawawi) in

the region to its own advantage.

95 As some Iraqis saw it, Israel had already used

“this weapon more than once, in effect, not necessarily in a direct manner; however,

the mere insinuation that it possesses it or its readiness to use it tips calculations

by virtue of the psychological effects it has, which are reflected in political and

military [terms] in the arena of confrontation.”96

Saddam believed that such brandishing of nuclear-based political clout worked

best when only one side had nuclear weapons.In fact,from his early days in power,

Saddam had already linked the acquisition of nuclear weapons with the prevention

of Iraq’s subordination to Israel. As he declared at a meeting of Iraq’s Council of

Ministers on 23 June 1981 (probably also hinting at a desire to elicit the Soviet

Union’s nuclear help),“I believe that anyone and any state in the world who wants

genuine peace and security and who really respects other peoples . . . and who does

not want these peoples to be subservient or oppressed by outside foreign forces

must help the Arabs by one means or another to acquire the atom bomb in order

to counteract the Israeli atom bombs which already exist.”97 Saddam himself was

sensitive to Israel’s use of this “offensive deterrence” as a tool to compel others to

accept unfavorable terms, although he called it by the less academic term

“blackmail” (ibtizaz).

98 He claimed that this, in fact, was what Israel had been

26 Norman Cigar
doing to the Arabs all along. Referring to Israel’s nuclear arsenal, he asked

rhetorically,“What would happen if ‘Israel’said to the Arabs, ‘What if it were to

impose conditions on the Arabs which, if the latter did not carry out,[Israel] would

then use atom bombs against them?’What would be the result for the Arabs, and

for humanity, in the face of this blackmail, and given this dangerous situation?”99

A document released recently by the Iraqi government may provide an insight into

Saddam’s potential use of nuclear weapons to browbeat someone into acquiescing

to his demands, even if by only using the capability as a bluff.When he was faced

with retaking cities in the rebellious South in 1991, following Iraq’s defeat in the

Gulf War, Saddam’s instruction to his top leadership were that leaflets be

airdropped by helicopter over a city, giving the inhabitants three hours to evacuate

to avoid an impending chemical weapons attack.This was only a ruse intended to

induce the rebels to leave cities so that they could be defeated more easily out in

the open.

100 However, given the history of his past use of chemical weapons, it was

a credible threat. Had he used similar methods (which he thought would succeed)

once he had acquired nuclear weapons there would have been no guarantee that he

was bluffing, and he might well have been tempted to try to impose his will

through such blackmail in future scenarios, especially against a nonnuclear opponent.

Iraq also feared that Iran would be able to duplicate this strategy against Iraq once

it, too, acquired nuclear weapons, a fear no doubt heightened by the blocking of

Iraq’s own nuclear program in the wake of the Gulf War. For one influential Iraqi

media commentator close to government circles, Sad Al-Bazzaz, the importance

of Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons beginning with the Shah lay in the fact that

this would have allowed Iran to become “an influential regional power.” And, a

nuclear capability would have allowed Iran to “impose deterrence on the regional

level”(fard al-rad fi al-nitaq al-iqlimi).

101 As a corollary,“the most important factor

which had propelled the Shah to develop a nuclear program in Iran was his desire

to play a hegemonic role in the Gulf region.”Specifically,Iran would be able to use

nuclear weapons as blackmail, in a coercive manner intended to “tear down the

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 27
will to resist any Iranian plans [which are] part of its strategy of extending its

regional influence and a subjugation of opposing wills.”102

As the same commentator explained further, “This is the art of not using force

despite its availability and of preventing other players from using force, and this is

the condition whose existence and effect are in effect before the initiation of

combat. That is, the Shah was in constant need of brandishing his stick in order

to carry out his role of regional policeman and, therefore, possessing nuclear

weapons would have responded to that requirement.And, by that means,the Shah

would have been able to transform his regional deterrent from a conventional one

to a nuclear one.”103 As he further assessed, “the impact of any Iranian nuclear

weapons, even if limited [in number], will be reflected primarily on Iran’s

neighbors—Iraq first of all, and the Arab Gulf states secondly— in terms of

imposing [Iran’s] hegemony, and in a revision in the pattern of relations on the

basis of intimidation, thus enabling Iran to achieve its regional goals.”104

CHANGING THE BALANCE OF POWER

The Ba’ath Party’s official daily newspaper, Al-Thawra, for its part, judged that

nuclear weapons were key in determining the balance of power in the Middle East

and maintained that the “American-Western attack to destroy Iraq’s nuclear

capability, which it used for peaceful purposes, and the American insistence on

preventing the Arabs from acquiring a nuclear capability” had been meant

specifically to ensure that Israel retained its nuclear monopoly.

105 Conversely,

breaking the Israeli nuclear monopoly had long been a stated Iraqi priority. An

intelligence assessment of Israel by Iraqi Air Force Intelligence in 1979, for

example, in evaluating the “vulnerabilities of Israeli military power,”had identified

one of these as “the acquisition of nuclear weapons by the Arabs.”106 Similarly, a

purported Israeli Ministry of Defense policy document outlining unacceptable

situations for its security was translated and distributed to field commanders in

the Iraqi military. One area that was particularly highlighted in that document

was the apparent fear by Israel of the acquisition of nuclear weapons by any Arab

28 Norman Cigar
state, as the document purportedly stated that “Israel will not permit the Arab

countries to develop nuclear weapons, as the existence of nuclear weapons in the

hands of any Arab country will be tantamount to a direct threat to the existence

of Israel.”107

THE POTENTIAL IMPACT OF AGGRESSIVE DETERRENCE

Although the intent of wielding nuclear clout in this aggressive manner was

attributed to others,Iraq clearly would have been able to pursue the same policy it

condemned—but claimed was successful—if it had acquired a nuclear capability

of its own.Even in the absence of overt or apparent conflict,the weight of an Iraqi

nuclear capability—combined with an activist policy backed by the use of other

forms of force—could have exerted a markedly negative influence in the region,

with potentially significant negative results for the interests of the United States.

That is,the dynamic that might be created by a regional power, even if it is simply

known to possess a nuclear capability, might, at a minimum, be what some

sociologists call“the third dimension of power”or “the other side of power”—other

actors, recognizing the existing power imbalance, abstain from conflicts with the

stronger actor, which they calculate they would be bound to lose or which would

inflict intolerable costs, and instead accommodate the stronger actor and accept

even an unfavorable status quo which the latter imposes.

108 One could equate the

situation to living in the shadow of a snow-covered mountain, where one might

unconsciously start to tiptoe even inside one’s own house out of concern for

triggering an avalanche. The negative implications for U. S. military access and

security assistance, economic relations, and internal stability of friends and allies

under such circumstances could be significant and long lasting.

A still more assertive aspect of this deterrence strategy involves actually engaging

in conventional and unconventional conflict at the subnuclear level, with nuclear

retaliation threats used as a shield to prevent escalation or retaliation. Iraqis

generally recognized that even with nuclear weapons, conflicts could still occur at

lower levels. Some observers posited that nuclear deterrence would be effective

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 29
only in certain scenarios and certainly would not be a sufficient factor to make

armed conflict at lower levels obsolete.

For example, the Iraqi Defense Ministry’s journal held that nuclear weapons by

themselves were not always capable of deterring conventional war; although the

Arabs had known that Israel already possessed nuclear weapons, this had not

prevented them from launching the 1973 War.

109 However, according to a highprofile study written well after the Gulf War,which appeared on a website run by

Saddam’s son, Udayy,Israel was able to launch conventional strikes with impunity

against Syrian forces in Lebanon thanks to its existing nuclear deterrent, which

limited Arab retaliation. The study also warned that by relying on its unilateral

nuclear deterrent, Israel would ultimately seek to “impose a political solution on

Syria and the Palestinian Authority.” At the same time, according to this study, it

was only Israel’s nuclear monopoly which prevented “neighboring Arab countries

and those further afield from intervening in Palestine if the situation collapses as

a result of the proclamation of a Palestinian state.”110

In other words, by being secure from nuclear retaliation, Saddam would now have

greater latitude in using other forms of force, be they conventional war, terrorism,

or even chemical or biological war, without fear of Israeli nuclear retaliation.

Thus, rather than creating a stasis, Saddam’s intent would likely have been to use

mutual deterrence to enable Iraq and the other Arab countries to have greater

space to maneuver in order to pursue a more aggressive policy toward Israel,

secure—even if mistakenly so—in the knowledge that Israel could not retaliate

without risking an escalation to an Arab nuclear strike.In sum, acquiring nuclear

weapons meant not simply the ability to prevent another country from using the

equivalent or similar weapons but also the ability to use the newly found clout to

assert one’s own independence and political will—even violently—to change an

unfavorable status quo at the expense of both nuclear and nonnuclear powers. If

those trends were indicative of the future direction of Saddam’s foreign policy, one

can posit that if and when Iraq was able to add nuclear weapons to its arsenal, he

might have become even more aggressive.

30 Norman Cigar
NUCLEAR WEAPONS AS A WARFIGHTING TOOL

Ultimately, Saddam approached the use of nuclear weapons not only as a political

tool, but also as a warfighting tool. He considered nuclear war feasible and nuclear

weapons to be an integral element of a country’s arsenal to be used on the

battlefield. It was largely Iraq’s military that approached this issue in a systematic

manner, but Saddam also seemed to consider in general terms the potential use of

nuclear weapons in war.

THE LINKAGE BETWEEN DETERRENCE AND WARFIGHTING

At its root, Iraq’s vision of nuclear deterrence was intimately linked to that of

warfighting. That is, deterrence could only be as effective as a country’s perceived

readiness to actually launch its nuclear weapons.Writing about nuclear deterrence,

one Iraqi observer noted that for small and medium-sized states, creating fear about

the actual willingness to use nuclear weapons was key to a credible deterrence

policy:“Small and medium-sized states . . .will not succeed in building an effective

foreign policy able to deter foreign threats unless this policy relies on national

power able to create fear in the minds of decision makers in hostile countries.”111

Central to Iraq’s assumption of this linkage was its perception that Israel would, as

a matter of course, use nuclear weapons on the battlefield; that is, that nuclear

weapons were not simply a political deterrent or a doomsday weapon. Significantly,

the above-cited study in Babil stressed that Israel had always refused to accept

limitations on its use of nuclear weapons in tactical scenarios.

112 The same study

also claimed that most of Israel’s nuclear warheads were tactical and that Tel Aviv

would have a very low threshold for their use.This warfighting scenario—including

preemptive war—was seen as inextricably linked to Israel’s effective use of

deterrence:“Zionist nuclear deterrence relies on the following basis: the readiness

of the Zionist entity to choose the nuclear option at the beginning of the period

of armed tensions preceding the outbreak of war.”113 The use of tactical nuclear

weapons, in particular—or “small-caliber nuclear weapons”(al-asliha al-nawawiya

dhat al-aira al-saghira) as the study terms them—would be key to Israel’s ability to

implement its deterrence.

114

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 31
IRAQ’S CONCEPT OF NUCLEAR WAR

IRAQI DOCTRINE

The Iraqi Army envisioned the use of nuclear weapons as an ordinary, if

indisputably more lethal, component on the battlefield.To date, no Iraqi document

containing a sustained discussion of the use of nuclear weapons at a strategic level

has surfaced. However,Iraq did develop a concrete doctrine for the use of nuclear

weapons in a warfighting mode at the tactical and operational levels. Specifically,

an Iraqi Army doctrinal manual was devoted to this issue, and the same concepts

were also included throughout the military system in an integrated series of

doctrinal publications.

The manual in question here was published in July 1988, and a copy was captured

by U.S.forces during the Gulf War.Manual:The Operational Useof Weaponsof Mass

Destruction appeared under the aegis of the Iraqi Army’s General Staff, Directorate

of Training, Chemical Branch, and carries an Iraqi security classification of

“Restricted to the Armed Forces.”115 It was signed off by Special Forces Staff

Lieutenant General Nizar Abd Al-Karim Faysal Al-Khazraji, chief of staff of the

Army, and carries his injunction on the cover sheet that this publication was

intended for “the training of the members of the Armed Forces,who are all to pay

close attention to its precepts.”116

The prospects for mutual deterrence were seen as limited in this manual, perhaps

based on the experience of the Iran-Iraq War, in which both sides used chemical

weapons, rather than being deterred from their use. The manual stresses that if

two countries both have nuclear weapons,they might deter each other from using

that capability, but this being the case was far from certain. If both combatants

have nuclear weapons, while mutual deterrence might place limits on the size of

the weapons used and the area affected, the manual assumes that, in and of itself,

possession of nuclear weapons by both sides will not deter their battlefield use:

“As long as one or both of the contending camps has nuclear weapons, the threat

of their use will continue.”117 The manual anticipates the potentially widespread

32 Norman Cigar
use of nuclear fires—requiring substantial nuclear arsenals—in an expected

escalation:“The battlefield,which is for now free of nuclear activity, may transform

itself into an arena full of nuclear explosions.”118

The underlying premise of Iraq’s doctrine as developed in this publication was that

escalation to nuclear war would be almost automatic and should be expected:

“Ordinarily, there is no clear, distinct boundary between the conditions of nuclear

war and nonnuclear war as long as both contending sides or one of them possesses

nuclear weapons.”119 However, at the same time, the possibility—however

unrealistic— of a de-escalation from nuclear warfare in a controlled manner in a

subsequent phase of a war is envisioned and might occur even after initial intensive

or unlimited nuclear exchanges because of practical concerns,such as“a diminution

of the two belligerent parties’ ability to produce and deliver nuclear weapons.”120

To be sure,this manual recognized that massive casualties could result from nuclear

strikes among the military and the civilian population on both sides,which “might

be a means of deterrence against the use of nuclear weapons, with neither side

willing to accept such casualties.”121However,what was seen as a more plausible—

if unrealistic—way to avoid massive casualties was a form of partial control, placing

only some limitations on the use of nuclear weapons:“These limits may include the

restriction of geographic areas in which the use of nuclear activity is permitted or

the determination of the maximum size of nuclear weapons with atmospheric

explosions only.”122 Nuclear exchanges might occur even when states have only

limited nuclear arsenals and in that case, optimistically,“conditions quickly return

to their normal situation.”123

DOOMSDAY WEAPON OR WARFIGHTING TOOL?

The Iraqi focus on warfighting in itself diluted more conventional deterrence, and

in this manual, nuclear war was portrayed as feasible and reasonable, suggesting

overall a lower than expected threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. To that

end, Iraqi doctrinal publications in general sought to downplay the destructive

potential of nuclear weapons and to provide guidance to military commanders to

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 33
“get rid of the imaginary ideas and the fanciful notions which some people’s heads

contain to the effect that nuclear weapons are doomsday weapons (silah mutlaq)

and that combat is impossible if they are used.”124

Military commanders were also directed to “stress that a defense can reduce losses

resulting from their [nuclear weapons’] destructive effects to a minimal level, and

that armies will fight nuclear wars in the future.”125 Furthermore, according to this

Iraqi doctrinal approach, “it must be stressed to the troops that a single bomb

cannot destroy more than a single unit,” and the casualties from the atomic strikes

in Japan were dismissed as resulting “from fires, from the ignorance of the

inhabitants of the cities, and from their surprise at the enemy’s use of a new weapon

for the first time in history.”126

Iraqi awareness of the destructiveness of nuclear war over the years does not seem

to have increased, as there are notes from Iraqi military briefings already from 1976

on the effects of nuclear weapons that had a similar thrust of reassurance,

concluding that protection was relatively simple and effective and claiming that “a

soldier at a distance of 3,200 yards should have no fears from a nuclear blast and

from the dangers of that blast.”127 Perhaps Iraq’s successful experience during the

Iran-Iraq War with fighting on a battlefield where chemical weapons were used

may have emboldened the Iraqi military to assume that the same experience could

be replicated with nuclear weapons.

As noted,the level of analysis of the doctrine in this manual remains, intentionally,

at the operational and tactical levels. Realistically, the difference among the levels

of war in the nuclear arena may well be more theoretical than actual, given the

destructive power, speed, and decisive effects that nuclear weapons can have, and

such distinctions in the nuclear field may be even less clear-cut than in

conventional wars. However, the explicit intent to focus at the tactical and

operational levels does indicate a readiness to envision nuclear weapons on the

battlefield and points to a considerably lower nuclear threshold than might

otherwise be the case. The very existence of this doctrinal manual indicates that

the Iraqi Army saw nuclear weapons very much as a practical warfighting tool to

34 Norman Cigar
be used on the battlefield, both in the defense and in the offense.

In fact, nuclear weapons are seen as an element to be integrated fully into the battle

in conjunction with conventional forces. For example, on the offensive, the

conventional forces of choice on a nuclear battlefield are seen as small mobile units,

including heliborne forces, which can maneuver independently and can operate

over a wide area in combination with supporting nuclear fires. Armored forces are

also seen as appropriate in this environment, because of their mobility, firepower,

and relative degree of force protection (or as the manual terms it, “partial

protection”).

128

Tactically, nuclear weapons are even said to resemble conventional weapons in

some ways, being no more than bigger artillery: “Ordinarily, nuclear fires are used

in the same way and with the same objectives for which nonnuclear fires have

always been used.”129 Specifically, the stated intent of this warfighting function is

that“nuclear fires will be used just as other artillery fires,with the goal of destroying

or paralyzing enemy positions and to hinder and harass the enemy’s operation [by

which he intends] to recover his combat effectiveness.”130

Rather than just remaining at a general descriptive level, in many instances the

doctrine in this manual becomes prescriptive and spills over into detailed tactics,

techniques, and procedures, with a very practical “how-to” focus, indicative of an

expectation of the applicability of this doctrine in the not-too-distant future. For

example,formats are provided in the appendices for staffs in preparing nuclear fire

plans, operational orders, and requests for nuclear fire support that highlight the

applied thrust of this manual.

Since Iraq did not possess nuclear weapons at the time, or at any time thereafter,

the drafting of such a doctrine was still clearly anticipatory.Nevertheless, even the

fact that such doctrine existed is in itself highly suggestive of Iraq’s objectives and

expectations in this arena. As this doctrinal manual was not in the public domain,

in no way could it be viewed as having been intended to be a conscious contribution

by Iraq to strategic deterrence, in the sense that Iraq might have wanted potential

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 35
adversaries to see the document as an indication of Baghdad’s readiness to employ

nuclear weapons that might cause them to be more wary about confrontation.

Moreover, the approach to the use of weapons of mass destruction in war as

reflected in other Iraqi Army doctrinal and operational documents indicates that

this manual was very much integrated in mainstream Iraqi military thinking,rather

than being an isolated low-level think piece. In a way, this was a capstone

document, presenting nuclear doctrine as a cohesive whole,while numerous other

doctrinal publications contained more concise judgments or addressed specific

elements related to this topic.

That this doctrine carried the highest military approval authority reinforces the

perception of a top-down conceptual diffusion in the Iraqi Army,with a common

approach to be reflected in doctrine and operational plans at all levels.In addition,

the fact that the July 1988 version was already the third edition suggests that the

Iraqis may have been thinking about this issue for some time. Indeed, an Iraqi

doctrinal publication highlighting the operational use of weapons of mass

destruction—as well as those of a radiological nature—had existed at least

by 1984.

131

Likewise, the prospect of nuclear war had also become more routine, and the

unintended escalation of conventional conflicts into nuclear ones was seen as a

distinct possibility. For example, a section entitled “Conceptualizing the Eruption

of a Nuclear War”in a briefing found in the Iraqi Army’s archives posits that wars

could easily escalate to the nuclear level, with the document presenting two

scenarios about how this could unfold: “A war may begin with conventional

weapons, but if both sides possess nuclear weapons and if one of them loses the

capability to operate in a conventional war, it may have recourse—in a desperate

attempt—to nuclear weapons in order to maintain the balance.”132

The same document also envisions a lower-level confrontation escalating into a

limited or general nuclear war. And the briefing raises what it sees as a very

difficult, but key, tactical dilemma: whether to mass or disperse in preparation for

going nuclear in order to achieve “a decisive outcome.”133 The brief also blithely

36 Norman Cigar
expresses optimism about the Iraqi Army units’ ability to operate on such a

battlefield “because they have plenty of protective gear and means of detection, as

well as special systems (mandhumat) to counter these weapons.”134

SADDAM’S MIRROR IMAGING OF ADVERSARIES

Indicative perhaps of Saddam’s own penchant for “mirror imaging,”his belief that

others—and Israel, in particular—approached the issue in terms similar to his own

(including at the operational and tactical levels) no doubt reinforced his hawkish

view of nuclear weapons. Some Iraqi analysts saw the use of nuclear weapons on

the battlefield as something to be expected, attributing this intent to Israel, and

sketched some plausible scenarios. Specifically, these Iraqi analysts assumed that

Israel had at least considered using nuclear weapons during the 1973 War, had the

situation on the ground deteriorated significantly to Tel Aviv’s detriment.

135

The Babil study of 2003, for its part, still viewed Israel as prepared to use nuclear

weapons on the battlefield and assessed that capability as having considerable

utility, indicating little development in Iraqi thinking over the years on this key

issue. According to this study, by using tactical nuclear weapons, Israel would be

able to achieve a major advantage in operational terms, “since the Zionist entity

would then gain the initiative and transition to the offensive on the front against

which it launched its nuclear strike.”Israel could even initiate a preemptive nuclear

strike with tactical weapons as “strategic defense”in case it expected a multifront

Arab attack, or it could strike “large civilian targets if there is a threat to the Zionist

entity within the borders of occupied Palestine.”Use of tactical nuclear munitions,

according to the study, would be enough to halt any Arab attack and force the

other parties to negotiate “on conditions favorable to the Zionist entity.”136

Likewise, the Saddam regime also considered the United States’ use of nuclear

weapons against Iraq, both during the confrontation of 1990-91 and before the

looming war of 2003, as a realistic possibility.The Iraqis believed,for example,that

Secretary of State James Baker had warned them in no uncertain terms that the

United States would contemplate using nuclear weapons to retaliate if Iraq used

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 37
chemical weapons.

137 At the time, the Iraqi press was filled with information on

civil defense against a potential U.S. or Israeli nuclear strike in order to prepare the

public.

138 Given the potential to create panic and undermine civilian morale,such

a move on the part of the Iraqi government would not have been likely unless an

attack appeared to be a realistic possibility.

In practical terms,this assumption of a probable nuclear battlefield, in light of the

perceived low threshold for the use of such weapons, induced Iraqi units in the

field during Operation Desert Shield to generate specific plans for damage control

resulting from a nuclear strike, presumably by the United States, in response to

directives from higher echelons.

139 Again, in the run-up to the 2003 war,the Iraqi

press noted that the United States recently had abandoned its view of nuclear

weapons simply as a deterrent, and predicted as a result “a feverish international

arms race with weapons of mass destruction” and wondered what scenarios might

prompt the latter to unleash its nuclear weapons against Iraq.

140 Another article in

the Iraqi press likewise suggested that the United States might use nuclear

weapons to destroy Iraqi bunkers if its forces were obliged to set up sieges around

cities,rather than forcing their way in.

141 In fact, according to Iraqi military officers,

in April 2003, Saddam and his son Qusayy had ordered them to warn their troops

that the United States would use nuclear weapons against Baghdad, although this

ploy may also be seen as another instance of bad judgment, helping to depress Iraqi

morale even further.

142

THE COMBAT USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS: HOW LIKELY?

SADDAM AS DECISION MAKER

Ultimately, the key question is whether Saddam actually would ever have used

nuclear weapons, either strategically or on the battlefield. Unquestionably, the

decision would have been up to Saddam himself, and it is not likely that there

would have been effective dissident voices at such a time. Indicative of his

intolerance of disagreement and his paranoid outlook, Saddam had Riyadh

Ibrahim, his Minister of Health, executed when the latter expressed less than

38 Norman Cigar
complete support during the Iran-Iraq War.

143 Even more to the point, opposing

Saddam on the use of weapons of mass destruction would also have been dangerous

and unlikely. When General Al-Bariq Al-Hajj Hinta, a hero from the Iran-Iraq

War, refused to use chemical weapons against the Kurds, Saddam reportedly had

had him killed.

144

In general, Saddam’s governing style ensured that only positive—but often false or

exaggerated—information reached him, skewing his ability to make sound and

timely decisions.

145 Such distorted information included reports of exaggerated

progress and capabilities in the nuclear field, which may have made his ability to

act with the agility required when conducting a policy of nuclear deterrence

more difficult.

146

SADDAM’S CALCULUS

To be sure,Saddam’s decision to use nuclear weapons need not have been automatic

or unavoidable when and if Iraq had acquired such a capability. Saddam, admittedly,

was a pragmatist and anything but suicidal, and he could show flexibility if his

cost-benefit calculus indicated such a course of action.

147 For example, in light of

the clear imbalance of power and his preoccupation with the Iran-Iraq War, he

had thought it prudent to forego a direct response to Israel’s attack on the Osirak

reactor,to the dismay of more bellicose Arab figures such as Yasir Arafat, a decision

which must have caused Saddam considerable embarrassment at home and in the

Arab world.

148 Likewise, in 1998, at the time of another Iraqi confrontation with

the United States, Saddam reportedly was careful to communicate to Israel that he

had no intention of launching missiles at it.

149

As had been the case with its chemical weapons, Saddam’s use of nuclear weapons

would probably have been scenario-dependent.Indeed, Saddam’s decisions in such

areas as who would control the launching of nuclear weapons might have

overridden specific elements contained in doctrine. Almost assuredly, the final say

would have remained with Saddam. For example, during the early phases of the

Gulf War, Saddam ensured that he would personally control initiating the use of

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 39
chemical weapons,rather than delegating such authority to lower echelons.Thus,

an order dated 20 September 1990 and classified top secret from the commander

of the 27th Infantry Division reminded subordinate units that “the use of the

chemical effort will not occur except by order of the supreme commander (al-qaid

al-amm),” citing an order sent by the Office of the Chief of Staff of the Iraqi Army

on 12 September 1990.

150

A key element of his decision would have been whether Saddam believed the use

of such weapons was necessary in the situation. For example, although Iraq had

developed a binary chemical weapon by 1988, the Iraqis had not used it against

the Iranians, no doubt because, by that time, Iraq’s conventional weapons

superiority was assured.

151 And, although Saddam had used chemical weapons on

numerous occasions in the Iran-Iraq War and against the Iraqi Kurds, he did not

use that capability during the Gulf War, most likely deterred by factors such as the

expected disproportionate retaliatory capability of the United States or Israel,the

perceived operational difficulties of the Kuwait theater of operations, or the fear

of personal pursuit that could have been sparked by such a decision.

152 However,

had Saddam perceived a more favorable cost-benefit balance—especially against

a nonnuclear power—or a need to retaliate for a devastating regime-threatening

blow, he might have been more tempted to use even nuclear weapons.

During the Gulf War, when Saddam reportedly sought to develop at least one

nuclear weapon, an Iraqi nuclear scientist concluded, “This guy [Saddam]

intended to use it during the Gulf War. We just didn’t deliver it; that’s what

stopped him . . .they wanted it mounted on a long-range missile . . .which means

it was meant for Israel, most probably.”153 The Iraqi scientific community, as was

true of any observer, could only speculate as to how, or whether, Saddam would

actually have used nuclear weapons. Some scientists, such as Numan Al-Naimi,

were not sure at all.

154 Husayn Al-Shahristani was also unsure how nuclear

weapons might have been used, especially against foreign adversaries, but was

confident that Saddam would have used them against domestic enemies, as he

had done with chemical weapons, although that situation appears unrealistic.

155

40 Norman Cigar
Yet another nuclear scientist, Asad Al-Khafaji, for his part, reports that at a

graduation ceremony for Iraqi military officers in 1980, Saddam had said openly,

“It is on Tel Aviv that we will drop the atom bomb—which the West is accusing

us of developing to be used against Khomeini’s Iran—when we really finish

developing it.”156 Based on the crash program, which Saddam ordered after

invading Kuwait, Mahdi Obeidi believes that with only one atom bomb possible,

if any, it only might have made sense to use it in a desperate strike against Israel.

He judged that “nothing was beyond Saddam” and that he would have used such

weapons against anyone.

157

Moreover, it is not farfetched to assume that, in a situation such as that during the

Iran-Iraq War, which at times proved exceptionally frustrating for the Iraqi

leadership, Saddam might have decided to use nuclear weapons, had they been

available. Hard-pressed Iraqi field commanders during the Iran-Iraq War, not

surprisingly, looked to those weapons to shore up their precarious positions. One

division commander, for example, after a successful Iranian offensive, asked Asad

Al-Khafaji, “Doctor, when is your organization going to intervene to decide the

issue?”What he was asking, as Al-Khafaji understood it,was when they would be

able to attack Iran with nuclear weapons.

158 Another senior officer, a lieutenant

general and chief of staff of a corps in the Iraqi Army during the Iran-Iraq War,

for his part, believes that Saddam would have used nuclear weapons against the

Iranians had they been available.“Of course. Saddam would have used anything he

had, including nuclear weapons. He was faced with a problem of Iranian numbers

and was willing to use everything.”159

Saddam’s now-celebrated meeting with U.S.Ambassador April Glaspie in the runup to his invasion of Kuwait in 1990 is also suggestive in this respect. According

to the Iraqi transcript of the session, Saddam supposedly told his interlocutor that

had the United States been in Iraq’s position, it would not have been able to risk

10,000 casualties in order to stem a successful Iranian breakthrough in the recently

ended Iran-Iraq War, and it would have then resorted to nuclear weapons

instead.

160 Saddam’s assumption on that score could indicate that he, too, might

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 41
have made that choice had he been faced with such a dilemma and had nuclear

weapons at his disposal.

THE SIZE OF THE ARSENAL: HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

GOALS AND POSSIBILITIES

How large a nuclear arsenal did Saddam want eventually and was it realistic for

him to believe that Iraq could produce enough weapons to implement an effective

nuclear strategy in diverse contexts? The acquisition of nuclear munitions delivered

on the battlefield by air and artillery, as envisioned in the doctrinal manual

described above, would have required a complex and large nuclear arsenal, which

was well in the future for Iraq even if all had proceeded as planned. The manual

does, however,suggest that such an arsenal would be the ultimate goal. Possessing

one bomb or even a handful, though significant, would have limited Saddam’s

possibilities for maneuver, though it would still have had a psychological impact.

Iraq Survey Group head David A. Kay reported that Iraq had set the goal of

producing 20 bombs a year. According to Mahdi Obeidi, after he and his team

had achieved their breakthrough in enrichment by means of centrifuges in 1990,

significant amounts of fissionable material could have been produced and the

nuclear program eventually “could have given Saddam hundreds of bombs.”161

NUMERICAL PARITY DOES NOT MATTER: IRAQ’S

ASSESSMENT OF OTHER CASES

However, as Iraqi observers stressed, having a numerically equivalent arsenal was

not necessary to generate significant political effects and to have a disproportionate

impact. It seems that Saddam’s assumption had been that Iraq could deter the

United States with a small nuclear arsenal. In effect, Iraqis in influential circles

were convinced that nuclear weapons in the hands of regional states could deter

even superpowers.

The North Korean example was instructive for the Iraqis, who interpreted the

latter’s development of nuclear weapons as equivalent to establishing an effective

42 Norman Cigar
deterrent against the United States. An editorial in the official daily newspaper,

Babil,run by Saddam’s son Udayy, claimed that North Korea had used its newfound

nuclear capability to threaten to “turn the entire Korean region into a pile [of

ashes]” and had warned that “the [South] Koreans will not survive a frightening

nuclear tragedy.”This, it was said, had deterred the United States from aggression

and had convinced the latter to negotiate during the latest standoff, favoring

Pyongyang’s goal of extracting a promise of nonaggression from Washington.

162

Another editorial in Babil praised North Korea for pursuing a nuclear weapons

capability in response to the United States’ alleged blackmail and attempts to

impose its hegemony and concluded that“[North] Korea had every right to acquire

the same technology which the American leadership had used to obliterate the

Japanese cities completely.”163 Claiming that the Arabs “are the most exposed to

blackmail and humiliation from the Zionist entity and all the American

administrations,”the same editorial concluded that “The Korean lesson is worthy

of the Arabs’ careful consideration.”164

Iraqis stressed the utility of North Korea’s nuclear capability, regardless of its not

being equivalent to the United States’ arsenal. According to this view, developing

a numerically equivalent nuclear arsenal to that of another country was unnecessary

for deterrence to be effective.Rather,sufficiency was to be interpreted as functional

equivalency.Moreover,the effectiveness of a supposed deterrent would not require

that Pyongyang even be able to reach the continental United States, but only that

it be able to threaten the United States’regional friends and interests, according to

an unsigned article in the “Studies”section of the Babil website.

165

DELIVERY AND CREDIBILITY

Of course, even had Saddam acquired nuclear weapons, a lack of delivery means

would have prevented establishing credibility. Fortunately for Saddam, Iraq’s

pursuit of long-range surface-to-surface missiles and aircraft able to reach Israel

was considerably further along than that for the bomb itself. By 1990, the

commander of the Iraqi Air Force and Air Defense, Staff Pilot Major General

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 43
Muzahim Sab Hasan, in fact, boasted that “we will not hesitate to destroy any

target within ‘Israel.’”166 In addition to the Al-Husayn, a Soviet-origin Scud with

an extended range of 600 km, Iraq also possessed the Al-Abbas, (900 km range),

and work was progressing on the Al-Hamza, (1,200–1,500 km range) and on the

Tammuz, (which was related to the Al-Abid, Iraq’s space launch vehicle) with a

range of 2,000 km, and indicative of Iraq’s ultimate broader horizons.

167According

to Husayn Al-Shahristani, the Al-Abid was specifically developed to carry a

nuclear warhead.

168 He estimated that the Al-Abbas and Al-Abid would have

gone into production by 1993.

169

A MATURING OF IRAQ’S PERSPECTIVE?

MATURATION AND THE SUPERPOWERS

True, one might reasonably posit an evolution in thinking by new nuclear powers,

similar in its trajectory to that which occurred in the United States and the Soviet

Union, leading eventually to a more stable and ultimately less violent competition

than would otherwise have been the case. Saddam’s thinking, too, might have

matured once Iraq became a nuclear power, based on exercises and tests with real

weapons rather than theoretical constructs for doctrine. A case in point, the Iraqi

doctrinal manual on nuclear warfighting cited above reflects doctrine that was

several generations behind that in use at the time in the United States. In some

instances,there are internal contradictions and what one might argue are crude or

simplistic judgments, as well as a sense of unjustified authoritative confidence,

characteristic of an illusory assumed mastery of new concepts and situations and

of an incomplete awareness of all relevant parameters.

Admittedly, the United States, too, had displayed a similar readiness to fight on a

nuclear battlefield in the 1950s, with President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “New

Look” and the emphasis on atomic weapons and massive retaliation as a costeffective means of providing for the national defense. However reluctantly, the U.

S. Army had even begun to reorganize itself partially into what came to be known

as the “Pentomic Army,”with the specific intent of being able to fight on a nuclear

44 Norman Cigar
battlefield.

170 With the advent of the John F. Kennedy administration, however, a

rapid and pronounced shift away from an unpopular tactical nuclear focus in

organization and doctrine occurred and, while this aspect was retained as a

possibility in subsequent doctrine, a clear distinction was made between nuclear

and conventional war,with a focus on the latter.

171Yet, indicative of the nonlinearity

of the evolution of such thinking, even in the United States, was the fact that on

more than one occasion during the Vietnam War, the use of nuclear weapons was

at least considered.

172 And, even more recently,the George W.Bush administration

reemphasized prominently the United States’right to the preventive use of nuclear

weapons in selected situations and reportedly considered using nuclear weapons to

eliminate Iran’s emerging nuclear infrastructure.

173

Soviet thinking, for its part, had continued to envision a nuclear battlefield

throughout the 1960s as a normal environment and, not unlike the doctrine in this

Iraqi manual, emphasized the offensive exploitation of nuclear weapons combined

with conventional arms, surprise, tempo, and readiness to operate in a nuclear

environment.

174 However, by the 1970s, and more fully in the 1980s,with the rise

of Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov and others, who argued that battlefield nuclear

weapons no longer made sense given the anticipated costs and potential alternative

means, Soviet views on deemphasizing tactical nuclear weapons came more into

line with those of the United States.

175

IRAQI THINKING: A DIFFERENT TRAJECTORY?

Overall, one gets the impression that Iraq’s approach to nuclear war mirrored, in

many ways, thinking from a bygone era in the United States, with early U.S.

writings still being used by Iraq as a source of inspiration. For example, an Iraqi

textbook on WMD (unquestionably written in the 1980s) used at the Iraqi

Military Academy featured an illustration for decontaminating one’s body after a

nuclear attack that was taken from a U. S.Army field manual published in 1953.

176

By the late 1980s, when the main Iraqi doctrinal manual was published, the

thinking upon which it was based had largely gone out of favor in both the United

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 45
States and the Soviet Union; one cannot assume that the same sophistication and

restraints that had developed over the years by the two superpowers would also

have applied to Saddam and to the Iraqi military decision makers at the time or

in the future.

As Richard K. Betts notes, decision makers, of necessity, formulate paradigms or

models, whether consciously or unconsciously, to make sense of problems and

organize and interpret relevant information to enable them to make decisions.

177

Realistically, a leader’s paradigms, once established, are hard to dislodge even in the

face of contradictory evidence, something that Robert Jervis terms “premature

cognitive closure.”178 If the original paradigms, as in Saddam’s case, are based on

enduring questionable assumptions or misperceptions using faulty or incomplete

information, the result is likely to be flawed policies.

Saddam’s thinking about nuclear weapons in Iraq might have evolved over time.

However, he did not seem to have been maturing in his approach to this matter

over the admittedly short span when the issue of nuclear weapons was salient to

the country, in part perhaps because he was never presented with the reality of

nuclear weapons in the Iraqi arsenal.

The parameters within which Saddam evaluated threats and formulated strategic

objectives skewed his decision-making process, and there would certainly have

been a long and tortuous period of “learning,” marked by uncertainty and ample

potential for missteps of tragic proportions.Ultimately, observers might have been

justifiably uncomfortable with Saddam’s proven willingness to use other WMD—

specifically, chemical weapons—on the battlefield under the appropriate

circumstances. Based on his propensity to miscalculate, he might well have

repeated this course of action with nuclear weapons, especially as he would have

had no practical experience or reliable roadmap from other countries in a similar

context as Iraq.

46 Norman Cigar
PREPARING TO BE A NUCLEAR POWER

WAITING FOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS: IRAQ’S WINDOW OF VULNERABILITY

CREATING A NUCLEAR-FREE ZONE

Although there is no consensus as to when Iraq would have developed and fielded

nuclear weapons of its own (See Appendix), until it could do so, Saddam no doubt

viewed Israel’s nuclear monopoly as a worrisome threat. One counter that he

attempted during this period of vulnerability was to use Iraq’s future potential for

obtaining nuclear weapons as a bargaining chip to pressure Israel to agree to

relinquish its own WMD as part of a WMD-free zone in the Middle East. For

example, in a 1990 interview, when asked whether the United States suspected

that Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons, Saddam asked rhetorically, “Is it wise to

wait for Iraq, or Egypt, or Syria, or Tunisia to acquire the atom bomb. . . . Nuclear

bombs facing off against a number of Israeli nuclear bombs, is that better? Or is it

better if Israel were not permitted to possess chemical, biological, and nuclear

weapons?”179 Insofar as its implementation would have resulted in an Iraqi

advantage by neutralizing Israel’s existing nuclear arsenal, Iraq might have been

genuine in its calls. However, given the extremely limited prospects of Israel’s

agreement, especially in light of the mounting tensions between Israel and Iraq in

the late 1980s, this was in all likelihood more of a publicity effort than a realistic

initiative on Saddam’s part.

INTERIM WMD: BINARY CHEMICAL WEAPONS

At the same time, during Iraq’s fretful quest to find a response to Israel’s nuclear

weapons threat and set against the background of the confrontation with Tel Aviv

over Iraq’s nuclear program, Saddam also seemed to indicate that deterrence had

been achieved by 1990 with his announcement that Iraq possessed binary chemical

weapons and surface-to-surface missiles (SSMs) able to reach Israel.Whether he

or other Iraqis genuinely believed in the equivalence of nuclear and chemical

weapons or whether the bluster, with its menacing tone, was intended to serve as

a temporary deterrent and to enhance Saddam’s image at home and in the region,

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 47
at the time Iraqis portrayed Israel’s nuclear arsenal as having been essentially

neutralized, echoing Saddam’s conclusion that “We do not need a nuclear bomb,

because we have binary chemicals.”180 According to the military press, the result

of Iraq’s acquisition of binary chemical weapons was that Israel’s “weapon of

‘technical superiority’ has been eliminated in fact and in practice.”181 The Iraqi

mass media followed suit, noting that even Israeli officials allegedly believed that

“Israeli technical dominance no longer exists today and that the technological and

military balance is now in favor of the Arabs.”182 Indeed, the Iraqi Ministry of

Defense’s official journal now labeled Israel a “paper tiger,”since the situation had

changed “with the existence of the binary chemical weapon . . . whose fires can

burn half of the Zionist entity if the latter attempts any attack against Iraq,” even

if “Israel threatens Iraq and the Arabs with nuclear weapons.”183 As Saddam

himself told a visiting American journalist in 1990,“I said the following clearly .

. . if Israel thinks that it is able to use nuclear weapons just because it has them, it

must remember that Iraq has binary chemical weapons, which are capable of

causing [Israel] great harm.”184

NO SUBSTITUTE FOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Presumably,Saddam viewed chemical weapons as only a temporary stop-gap shield

in anticipation of a preferred expected nuclear capability. After all, both Iraq and

Iran had used chemical weapons in combat during their recent war, suggesting

that they might not be an effective deterrent after all. Saddam seemed to

acknowledge that Iraq was making a virtue of necessity in this respect,recognizing

the superiority of nuclear weapons: “how can you expect Iraq not to use chemical

weapons in confronting atomic bombs belonging to a party which picks fights and

which continuously threatens the Arab nation and Iraq? Is it nuclear weapons or

chemical [the original has an obviously erroneous “hydrogen”] weapons which are

the more destructive?”185 Indeed, the conclusion of the 2003 Babil study was that,

ultimately, the same weapon would be required to counter Israel’s nuclear threat:

“It is clear from the preceding [discussion] that the extent of the dangerous threat

which the Zionist nuclear strategy represents for the Arabs is a matter which, as

48 Norman Cigar
a corollary, mandates the need to prepare for that threat by developing the same

military arsenal as [the other] states in the region have ...in order to confront the

looming Zionist nuclear threat.”186

Whatever assumptions there may have been in a moment of hubris about Iraq’s

ability to deter nuclear weapons after Saddam had announced that Iraq had binary

chemical weapons,when the Desert Shield confrontation developed, Saddam was

probably much less certain that chemical weapons alone could deter nuclear strikes.

Tariq Aziz, for example, wondered publicly in a press conference: “‘Israel’ has

nuclear weapons and you cannot give me assurances that ‘Israel’will not use them

against us or against other Arabs.”187

The Iraqi Army,too, had regressed to the assumption that nuclear weapons might

well be used against its fielded forces, implying recognition that whatever chemical

weapons were available in Iraq’s arsenal, they simply were not enough to deter a

potential nuclear attack.In fact,following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990,

Baghdad even reportedly accelerated its nuclear weapons program, according to

more than one Iraqi nuclear scientist. A few days after the invasion of Kuwait,

Husayn Kamil—Minister of Military Industry and then responsible for the nuclear

program—delegated Jafar Diya’ Jafar to combine the efforts of his establishment

with that of Mahdi Obeidi,to initiate a crash program intended to produce a bomb.

Obeidi assessed that “The crash program showed his [i.e., Saddam’s] desperation

for a single atomic weapon, a crude bomb.”188

WOULD SADDAM HAVE REVIVED THE NUCLEAR PROGRAM?

Saddam and his coterie seem to have persisted in seeing great utility in having

nuclear weapons, as suggested by their perception of the putative benefits to North

Korea in developing even an embryonic nuclear weapons program. Iraq had

continued after the Gulf War to monitor progress by other countries in developing

their nuclear programs, with a particular interest in how they managed to do so

despite pressure by the United States.

189 In light of the continuing Iraqi

appreciation for nuclear weapons, it is at least a valid question as to whether

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 49
Saddam would have revived his pursuit of a similar capability if conditions had

permitted him to do so once again. Based on available reports, Saddam would

probably not have abandoned his conviction about the benefits of having a nuclear

arsenal, and would have remained committed to pursuing that goal. A nuclear

capability would have made particular sense in the wake of the Gulf War,

considering the serious weakening of Iraq’s conventional warfighting capability

and Saddam’s need to maintain his threatened regional position.

190

In that vein, Tariq Aziz, in his debriefing with U.S. authorities, confirmed that

“Saddam was fully committed to acquiring [nuclear weapons] despite the absence

of an effective program after 1991.”191 Mahdi Obeidi, by then director of projects

for the entire Ministry of Military Industry, also now believes that “Saddam would

have seized the first opportunity to make nuclear weapons as the opportunity

arose.”192 That was also the impression of Saddam’s principal interrogator after his

arrest, who concluded that Saddam “wanted to reconstitute his entire

WMD program.”193

After the Gulf War, Saddam reportedly did revive his support for the experts from

the stopped nuclear program, especially after the inflow of money from the Oil for

Food Program, beginning in 1998, but their focus was directed to teaching or to

ancillary basic research.

194 In the wake of the wartime destruction during the Gulf

War and the ensuing inspections and sanctions, Mahdi Obeidi believed that the

nuclear program simply could not be reconstituted, although the plans, technical

knowledge, and personnel remained.

195

Subsequent revelations about the extent of the nuclear network developed abroad

by Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan and others suggest that an

unfettered Iraq might have been able to find willing suppliers of assistance in this

field if the sanctions had eroded significantly due to international pressure.

196 What

is more, as was the case with Libya,shortcuts in nuclear development might have

been possible, to include the acquisition of nuclear weapons designs abroad.

197

Moreover, the sanctions which the United Nations had imposed on Iraq after the

Gulf War grew to be increasingly unwelcome in regional popular opinion, where

50 Norman Cigar
they were seen as causing hardships to the Iraqi population.

198 And, at the same

time, other countries, such as Russia, China, and France, appeared eager to

reestablish their earlier economic relations with Iraq.

199

Nevertheless, despite a more complicated political environment, the sanction

regime was re-energized in May 2002,when a new “smart sanctions”program was

instituted, largely due to concerted U.S. efforts.This new system relaxed controls,

but only over non-military imports,while more intrusive international inspections

were resumed. Under the circumstances, Saddam would likely have found it well

beyond his capabilities to reestablish his nuclear program for the foreseeable future,

although he presumably would have probed for opportunities to do so.

CONCLUSIONS

Overall, the Iraqi case study indicates that the trend toward nuclear proliferation

may be potentially even more worrisome than is sometimes thought.As a corollary,

continuing vigorous international efforts to halt or slow proliferation are

highly desirable.

Confidence in replicating the Cold War stabilizing influence of nuclear weapons

is misplaced. Not only may the context be specific to individual countries but, in

particular, such weapons in the hands of leaders whose calculus and decisionmaking styles may differ substantially from those of their superpower counterparts

during the Cold War may entail a strong possibility of increased miscalculation

and a lower threshold for their use.

Specifically, several conclusions can be drawn from the preceding analysis of

Saddam’s views and policies on nuclear weapons.

AVOIDING MIRROR-IMAGING—LEADERSHIP MATTERS

First, the Iraqi case highlights how risky it may be to mirror-image another

country’s perceptions and intentions, especially in the realm of nuclear weapons

where there are limited historical precedents.That is, to extrapolate the history of

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 51
U.S. and Soviet perceptions, intentions, and policy with regard to nuclear weapons

and their role in deterrence, and then to apply that to Saddam’s Iraq depended on

assumptions which were not always valid, based on what Saddam and other Iraqis

themselves said,wrote, and did.Understanding a leader’s worldview—especially in

authoritarian political systems where decision making may be highly

personalized—is key to evaluating the perspective and potential behavior of an

actual or would-be nuclear power.

200

Some analysts have highlighted, correctly, the importance of not ignoring the

impact of another country’s “strategic culture” as a factor shaping strategic

assessments and choices, arguing that “different states have different predominant

strategic preferences that are rooted in the early or formative experiences of the

state, and are influenced to some degree by the philosophy, politics, culture, and

cognitive characteristics of the state and its elites.”201 Evaluating national leaders

against the background of such factors as listed above, factoring in conceptual

strategies in the nuclear field such as deterrence and nuclear war and enduring and

less malleable givens such as history and geography, will yield a more accurate

understanding of a leader’s motivations, thinking, and possible utilization of

nuclear weapons than will assumptions based on paradigms drawn largely from

pure theory or from the experience of the superpowers.

NUCLEAR DETERRENCE MAY BE UNCERTAIN AND UNSTABLE

Second, and related to the differences in leadership and strategic culture,the Iraqi

case indicates that the concept of nuclear deterrence cannot be applied

mechanistically, and that the relationship between deterrence and stability needs

to be revaluated in a less absolute—and less optimistic—direction.

As seen from Saddam’s thinking, leaders of emerging nuclear powers may

conceptualize deterrence not only in a purely defensive mode, but also as a shield

permitting greater aggressive activity at a lower level—what was termed “offensive

deterrence” in this study—on the assumption that escalation to nuclear war may

be controlled and an adversary’s nuclear arsenal thus neutralized. While Saddam

52 Norman Cigar
was never able to implement such a policy in the absence of a nuclear capability,

his aggressive perception of deterrence, with a focus on the latter as an enabling

factor for further action (whether by means of political coercion or various levels

of violence)—could have been highly destabilizing. A slow and non-linear

conceptual learning progression could well be the norm for most emerging nuclear

powers, at the very least complicating regional stability and conflict resolution and,

potentially, opening up the way for catastrophic miscalculations.

202

In particular, tangible differences from the situation during the Cold War—

obstacles such as the small size of arsenals and their inherent vulnerability, limited

intelligence capabilities, inefficient command and control, etc.—are likely to hinder

the establishment of a stable deterrence regime in the case of emerging nuclear

powers.

203 Some Iraqi thinkers were aware of these differences and did not seem

to have been optimistic about the stabilizing effect of the spread of nuclear

weapons. Predicting a demand for nuclear weapons by an increasing number of

countries, one senior military officer,writing in the Iraqi armed forces’professional

journal, for example, concluded that, as a result of proliferation, “the risk of a

nuclear war erupting will increase.”204

To be sure, by the end of the Cold War, many academics in the West were already

suggesting that the mutual deterrence resulting from the great destructiveness of

nuclear weapons had channeled conflict—if it did occur—to levels of a lower

intensity, with some even holding that large-scale conventional wars would

disappear altogether.

205 More recently, the relationship between two nuclear

powers, India and Pakistan, and their apparent reluctance to escalate their

confrontations into full-scale war has often been accepted as proof of this

proposition and as emblematic of nuclear-induced stability.Critics have challenged

such views, arguing that the acquisition of nuclear weapons by both India and

Pakistan has, if anything, led to more frequent and more severe conventional and

unconventional conflict between the two countries in the absence of a fear of fullscale retaliation.

206

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 53
In fact, a strong case can be made, based on the India-Pakistan dyad, that nuclear

proliferation can contribute to the actual outbreak of conflict, not just to the

escalation of a confrontation.

207 True,some would have interpreted the recourse to

conventional or low-intensity conflict as a positive development, but this might be

valid perhaps only in comparison to a nuclear exchange, as even conflict at a lower

level could be highly destabilizing and destructive. And, in the case of India and

Pakistan, even though their confrontation of 2002 did not lead to war, the two

countries came very close to doing so and,“so close that an accident, miscalculation,

or small piece of misinformation might have touched off a disastrous conflict.”208

Rather than being an automatic factor for stability, nuclear weapons in the hands

of a revisionist leader could have the contrary effect, as suggested by the Iraqi case.

The key independent variable in this regard is the specific application of nuclear

deterrence, which can be used either to enhance stability or to engender a

disruption of the status quo,thereby leading to a potentially dangerous escalation.

A corollary to this observation is that considerable leadership skills are required to

manage the volatile brinkmanship situations which often arise as a result of a

reliance on deterrence.In that respect,rather than being an absolute factor, nuclear

deterrence may be only as effective and stable as the quality and orientation of the

leaders who conduct it. A political system where decision making is concentrated

in one individual or a small clique and debate is stifled even within government

circles can raise significantly the risk of the failure of deterrence, particularly if a

leader, or leadership clique, is quixotic, ill-informed, or prone to risk-taking.

Understanding the orientation and psychological outlook of a leader such as

Saddam assumes even greater importance in such a highly centralized

authoritarian system.

NUCLEAR WARFIGHTING MAY BE AN OPTION

Third, an assumption that nuclear weapons would never be used in a warfighting

mode may be flawed. There may well be some self-imposed restrictions on

countries from using nuclear weapons but some have argued that “normative

54 Norman Cigar
prescriptions” have “delegitimize[d] nuclear weapons as weapons of war.”209

However, this judgment may be too sweeping, for while it may apply to a great

extent to the behavior of the United States,states such as Saddam’s Iraq might be

more inclined to treat nuclear weapons use as more acceptable.

The somewhat cavalier and matter-of-fact perspective of a nuclear battlefield

expressed in Iraqi doctrine and discourse—which other countries may share—

would seem to imply an understatement of the potential destructiveness of nuclear

weapons and a greater willingness to use atomic weapons that may strike an

observer as particularly disconcerting. The result could well be the actual

operational use of such weapons, especially against an adversary who was not

similarly armed. In addition, given the different political culture and decision

making and command-and-control processes which characterized Saddam’s Iraq,

the potential for miscalculation might have been substantially higher than was the

case for the superpowers during the Cold War. Indeed, information made public

recently suggests that in the 1980s Cuba’s Fidel Castro was urging the Soviet

Union to launch a nuclear strike against the United States until convinced by

Moscow of the folly of that option.

210

Such differences in the approach to nuclear weapons suggest the need for

considerably greater caution and less optimism in evaluating the effects of

proliferation, especially with respect to countries where the thinking of the

leadership is just evolving or one which proceeds from an aggressive perspective

with an agenda bent on altering the status quo.When accompanied by a closed and

narrow-based decision making process, one cannot automatically expect the same

stabilizing results as demonstrated during the Cold War.

Significantly, the senior Iraqi military officer cited above, in addressing the

likelihood of the use of nuclear weapons in war, assessed that not all governments

might think alike, with some having a different calculus, and he singled out in

particular those governments “which do not possess a sense of the awesomeness of

such responsibilities.”211 Linking this threat to the importance of leadership style—

while of course not having the Iraqi case in mind and apparently not aware of the

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 55
irony—the same officer identified as a realistic risk for the use of nuclear weapons

in war the case where “a very stupid individual possessed by dreams of creating an

empire, one who would have recourse to all means at his disposal to achieve these

dreams, took power.”212

EVEN SMALL NUCLEAR ARSENALS CAN BE DESTABILIZING

Fourth, even a small nuclear arsenal in the wrong hands can be sufficient to cause

significant negative consequences for U.S. interests and regional stability.

Given Saddam’s perceptions and political objectives, Iraq’s initial acquisition of

even a few nuclear weapons could have had a disproportionate impact on U.S.

interests and on regional stability. The fact that the United States’ capabilities

would have dwarfed any potential Iraqi arsenal should not have been a cause for

complacency.The United States no doubt could have deterred Saddam—in most

likely scenarios—from using nuclear weapons against U.S. forces or against U.S.

territory one day in the distant future if Iraq had ever acquired long-range delivery

systems. However, even here one cannot be absolutely confident that this would

have been true in every scenario. Nuclear weapons might have been employed as

a last-ditch attempt to ward off complete defeat. Such a capability might also be

deployed as an act of revenge by a regime that is about to fall. Or, nuclear weapons

might be used to inflict what is perceived as an unacceptable level of carnage in an

attempt to bargain for a ceasefire.What is more, the danger of Saddam’s using or

threatening to use nuclear weapons in a regional conflict could have been not only

more likely but also potentially more destructive, especially in light of his history

of the use of chemical weapons on previous occasions.

As already noted, neighboring states might well have reconsidered their relations

with the United States if Iraq had acquired nuclear weapons. While some might

have drawn closer to Washington in the hope of assuring for themselves an

American nuclear umbrella, others might just as easily have distanced themselves

and sought to minimize the access granted to U.S. forces in an attempt to placate

a nuclear Iraq and to avoid its ire.

56 Norman Cigar
As a corollary,Iraq’s acquisition of nuclear weapons might also have spurred other

states in the region to initiate or accelerate—or at least consider—efforts along the

same path, either out of fear or out of a desire to emulate perceived success. This

pressure for a chain reaction of nuclear proliferation may well occur in the region

in a similar situation in the future.

213

MODIFYING THE THREAT ENVIRONMENT CAN HELP

Finally, modifying the regional threat environment may alleviate the pressures for

proliferation. This case study confirms the role of the domestic and regional

perception of threats in stimulating, and legitimizing, Saddam’s efforts to acquire

nuclear weapons.What can be done in similar situations is to remove or diminish

the sources of perceived insecurity which can magnify threat perceptions and serve

as a potent stimulus to fuel further proliferation.

214 Such political efforts may

reduce or at least slow down, if not eliminate, further proliferation. Specifically, in

the Middle East, a just resolution of the Arab-Israeli issue would contribute to

this effort by decreasing the perception of insecurity felt by potential nuclear

powers in the region. And, a resolution would also diminish the deep-seated sense

of injustice stemming from the current political situation and from the perceived

unfairness of the international community’s acceptance of Israel’s nuclear arsenal

while opposing one for any Arab country. While perhaps there is no automatic

and direct linkage, de-escalating key sources of tension in the region would likely

make public opinion less concerned about the need to confront Israel and,

therefore, perhaps less welcoming to proliferation, and would thereby reduce the

pressure on and incentive for local governments to match Israel’s arsenal.

On a different plane, less public emphasis on international calls for regime change

might lower the sense of embattlement which some regimes feel and reduce

perceptions of outside threats to such regimes’ survival. The result could be a

diminished sense of urgency to develop nuclear weapons and a reduction in the

pressure to attain internal or regional legitimacy by means of the development of

nuclear weapons.

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 57
Overall, this study suggests that any trend toward nuclear proliferation could

contribute to destabilizing effects—as was the case with Iraq—and argues for the

desirability of continuing vigorous international efforts to halt or slow proliferation.

It was a fortuitous occurrence, in the form of the Gulf War following Iraq’s

invasion of Kuwait that prevented having to actually test the impact of the eventual

acquisition of a nuclear arsenal by Saddam’s Iraq.Similar large-scale military means

of counterproliferation, of course, may be neither desirable nor feasible in other

cases, but international diplomatic and economic penalties and inducements at

lower levels can also help and must be pursued.

58 Norman Cigar
PROJECTIONS FOR IRAQ’S ACQUISITION OF NUCLEAR

WEAPONS

Baghdad appears to have come close to acquiring a bomb, but never did so, nor did

it reconstitute a capability to do so after the Gulf War.Though establishing a date

for achieving a nuclear device is not possible, especially given the varying estimates

by some of the same individuals over time,there is a rough consensus in retrospect

among Iraqi nuclear scientists and policy makers, as well as foreign observers,that

a bomb could have been made operational in the near future but for the

interruption of the Gulf War.

According to Husayn Al-Shahristani, Saddam had originally set a target date of

1991 for a nuclear weapon.

215 Jafar Diya’ Jafar claims, “Iraq was on the verge of

producing nuclear weapons on the eve of the first Gulf War.”216 Husayn AlShahristani, supporting this view, claims that Iraq in 1990 was about six months

away from developing its first nuclear device although, of course,weaponizing such

a capability would still have been some further time off.

217 A senior adviser to

Saddam Hussein, Lieutenant General Amir Al-Sadi, confirmed the general

projections of this timeline, noting that Iraq had come close to building an atomic

bomb by 1991.

218

On the other hand, for Mahdi Obeidi, achieving a bomb was “a year or two”

away.

219 David Kay put forward more modest estimates, even though he noted,“at

the time of the Gulf War, Iraq was probably only 18 to 24 months away from its

first crude nuclear device and no more than three to four years away from advanced,

deliverable weapons,” confirming a near-term horizon for Iraq’s acquisition of at

least some nuclear assets.

220 Yet another Iraqi scientist, Imad Khadduri, later also

assessed that a nuclear weapon would still have required “several years” after 1990,

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 59

AP P E N D I X
while Numan Al-Naimi projected that a bomb could have been ready only by

1994.

221 The CIA, for its part, in a July 1990 assessment, had estimated

optimistically that Iraq could develop nuclear weapons only by the late 1990s.

222

60 Norman Cigar
1. Gawdat Bahgat, Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East (Gainesville,

FL: University Press of Florida, 2007), 18.

2.Andrew Flibbert offers a perceptive analysis of the enduring geostrategic factors

with which Iraq has had to contend, irrespective of the regime in power in

Baghdad, and the their relationship to a pursuit of nuclear weapons,“After Saddam:

Regional Insecurity,Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Proliferation Pressures in

Postwar Iraq,” Political Science Quarterly, cxviii, 4, Winter 2003-04, 547–67. For

additional perspectives on this issue, see Norman Cigar, Thinking about Nuclear

Power in Post-Saddam Iraq, (Carlisle, PA: Army War College, Strategic Studies

Institute, April 2010).

3. On Saddam’s dominant leadership position and personalized decision-making

style, see Jerrold M. Post and Amatzia Baram, “‘Saddam Is Iraq, Iraq Is Saddam’

(Until Operation Iraqi Freedom),”in Barry R. Schneider and Jerrold M.Post, eds.,

KnowThy Enemy: Profilesof Adversary Leaders andTheir Strategic Culture,(Maxwell

Air Force Base, AL: USAF Counterproliferation Center, July 2003), 163–220.

4.Jafar Diya’Jafar and Numan Al-Naimi,Al-Itiraf al-akhir: haqiqat al-barnamij alnawawi al-iraqi [The Last Confession: The Truth about the Iraqi Nuclear Program],

(Beirut: Markaz al-dirasat al-arabiya, 2005), 74. Highlighting Saddam’s personal

commitment, he had wept openly when he saw the damage done to Iraq’s

Osirak/Thuweitha nuclear complex by the Israeli air strike in 1981, Ala’ AlAdhami, “Li-madha baka Saddam ind ma qasaf al-sahayina al-mufail al-nawawi

al-iraqi” [Why did Saddam weep when the Zionists bombed the Iraqi nuclear

reactor?], Al-Watan (Anaheim, California), 8 June 2009, online at

www.watan.com/feature/12486-2009-06-08-18-47-04.html.

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 61

NO T E S
5.The text of the Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq’s

WMD (Washington, DC: CIA, 30 September 2004) can be found on the CIA’s

website; online at https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports1/iraq_wmd_2004/index.html.This document is henceforth referred to

as Duelfer Report.

6. Duelfer Report, 8.

7.For an overview of the doctrinal development in the United States,see Lawrence

Freedman,“The First Two Generations of Nuclear Strategists,”in Peter Paret, ed.,

Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1986), 735–78; and Charles H. Fairbanks Jr.,“MAD

and U.S. Strategy,” in Henry D. Sokolski, ed., Getting MAD: Nuclear Mutual

Assured Destruction, Its Origins and Practice, (Carlisle Barracks, PA: Army War

College, Strategic Studies Institute,November 2004), 137–47.For the Soviet case,

see Harriet Fast Scott and William F. Scott, Soviet Military Doctrine: Continuity,

Formulation, and Dissemination,(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1988), 24-25, 36–

41; and John Battilega, “Soviet Views of Nuclear Warfare: The Post-Cold War

Interviews,”in Getting MAD, 151–74.

8. Post and Baram, 174.

9.Tariq Aziz, debriefing with U.S. authorities, Duelfer Report, 26.

10.E-mail from Imad Khadduri to the author, 9 February 2008. Humam Abd AlKhaliq was then head of Iraq’s Atomic Energy Commission.

11. Interview with Asad Al-Khafaji by Ahmad Yusuf, “D Asad Al-Khafaji: almashruat al-nawawiya laysat ‘makiyazhan’ siyasiyan li-l-hukkam” [Dr. Asad

Al-Khafaji: Nuclear programs are not just political “cosmetics” for rulers], AlHiwar al-mutamaddin (no location given), 16 October 2006, online at

www.alhewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=78306.

12. Staff MajGen Wafiq Al-Samarra’i, Al-Qira’at al-khati’a fi al-azmat al-iraqiya

al-khalijiya al-amirikiya [The Misreadings in the Iraqi-Gulf-American Crises],( n.p.:

62 Norman Cigar
Markaz dirasat Al-Iraq wa-l-Khalij, 1999), 128-29.

13. According to Col Valeriy Yaremenko, a Soviet military interpreter working

with the air defense unit at the site of the reactor, quoted in Andrey Pochtarev,

“Srazhayushchiysya ‘Vavilon’” [Battling “Babylon”], Krasnaya Zvezda (Moscow),

24 May 2003, online at www.redstar.ru/2003/05/24_05/6_01.html.

14. Document reproduced by the 11th Infantry Division Chemical Unit, Top

Secret, 26 March 1990, DIA File 524-1-021b.All the documents in this collection

have been declassified.

15. Sabri Hammadi,“Iran . . . humma al-tasalluh wa-al-tamaddud,”[Iran . . .Fever

of an arms buildup and expansion], Al-Thawra (Baghdad), 20 February 1992, 2.

The Iraqi media was often alarmist. One article stated as fact that the United States

presented Iran with a nuclear reactor, “Amirika qaddamat mufailan nawawiyan

yamal al-an fi Iran” [America donated a nuclear reactor which is now active in

Iran], Al-Thawra, 20 November 1991, 1.

16.Ali Al-Badri,“Al-Wilayat Al-Muttahida Al-Amirikiya tukafi’Iran nawawiyan!”

[The United States is rewarding Iran in the nuclear field],Al-Thawra, 21 February

1992, 2.

17. Speech by Saddam,“Nass hadith al-rafiq Saddam Husayn (hafidhahu Allah)

khilal liqa’ih li-l-rifaq amin sirr wa-ada’ qiyadat far Babil li-’l-hizb wa-qiyadat alshab fih”[The text of the speech by Comrade Saddam Husayn (may God preserve

him) during his meeting with the permanent secretary and the members of the

leadership of the Babil Party branch and the people’s leaders there], 14 February

1990,found in a set of handwritten transcriptions of his speeches as part of a source

book for an Iraqi Army unit’s Ba’ath Party political officers, Al-Sijill al-thaqafi liam 1990 [Cultural Record for 1990], unpaginated. Found in DIA File 500-2-37.

18.Iraqi News Agency, 5 June 1998.

19.For example, nuclear scientist Jafar Diya’Jafar,supports the post-Osirak version.

Interview with Jafar Diya’ Jafar by Ali Burdi, “La aslihat damar fi Al-Iraq waSaddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 63
khassabna al-uraniyum wahdana am 1990” [There are no weapons of [mass]

destruction in Iraq, and we enriched uranium by ourselves in 1990], Al-Nahar

(Beirut), 10 March 2004, online at www.annahar.com.

20. Oleg Grivenskiy,“Atomnaya bomba i Blizhniy Vostok”[The atom bomb and

the Middle East], Nezavisimaya gazeta (Moscow), 21 June 2001, online at

http://world.ng.ru/azimuth/2001-03-01/6_bomb.html. Grivenskiy was an official

in the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, during the 1980s,was director of the

Middle East Division.

21. Grivenskiy, “Atomnaya bomba.” This agreement apparently angered some

Soviets, with the USSR’s defense minister, Dmitriy Ustinov, commenting

caustically that “The French will sell their own mothers for enough money,”ibid.

22. Interview with Husayn Al-Shahristani by Nidhal Al-Laythi, “La alaqa li-’lmufail al-nawawi bi-intaj al-qunbula wa-Isra’il antajat qanabilha min dun mufail”

[There is no connection between a reactor and producing a bomb, as Israel

produced its bombs without a reactor], Al-Zaman (London), 5 May 2004, online

at www.azzaman.com/azz/articles/2004/05/05-26/858.htm.

23. Al-Shahristani, ibid.

24. See Grivenskiy, “Atomnaya bomba,” ibid. At the time, in 1980, Andrei

Gromyko,the Soviet Union’s minister of foreign affairs, did not share the concern

of his staff in the ministry over Iraq’s approaching acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Instead, he held that while this would cause much uncertainty in the region, it

would not pose a danger for the Soviet Union, while it would create problems for

Israel and the United States, ibid.

25.When one nuclear scientist, Jafar Diya’Jafar, met with Saddam in the wake of

the airstrike on the reactor, the latter commented bitterly: “How is it allowed for

Israel to have nuclear weapons while the Arabs do not have the right to have a

nuclear research program?”Al-Itiraf al-akhir, 58

26.Interview with Saddam reprinted in the collection Saddam Husayn sani wahdat

64 Norman Cigar
Al-Iraq wa-bani majd al-umma [Saddam Husayn, the Architect of Iraq’s Unity and

the Builder of the Nation’s Glory], ([Baghdad]: Mudiriyat al-tawjih

al-manawi, n .d.), 24.

27. Abd Al-Qadir Muhammad Fahmi,“Stratijiyat Al-Sin fi siyasat al-saytara ala

al-asliha al-nawawiya,” [China’s strategy on the policy of acquiring of nuclear

weapons], Al-Jumhuriya (Baghdad), 1 July 1991, 3.

28.Abd Al-Rahman Inad,“Al-Qunbula al-nawawiya al-hindiya wa-kasr ihtikar alkibar”[The Indian atomic bomb and the breaking of the monopoly of the Great

Powers], Al-Qadisiya (Baghdad), 16 May 1994, 3.

29. “Al-Rad fi al-siyasa al-kharijiya” [Deterrence in foreign policy], part 1,

Al-Thawra al-arabiya (Baghdad), March 1987, 36. Articles in this journal were

never signed.

30. Al-Qira’at al-khati’a, 116-17.

31. Document found in DIA File 104-18-2.

32. Al-Sijill al-thaqafi li-am 1990.

33. According to Saad Tawfiq, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist, he had had no

qualms about his work, because he believed it would help achieve an “equilibrium

with Israel,” quoted in James Risen, State of War:The Secret History of the CIA and

the Bush Administration (New York: Free Press, 2006), 97-8.

34. Discussion by the author with Mahdi Obeidi, 25 January 2008. Dr. Obeidi was

the Chief Scientist in charge of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.

35. Reported by the author’s wife, a physics student in Baghdad in the 1980s.

36. According to one Iraqi general interrogated after the 2003 war, Saddam was

interested in WMD because he “had an inferiority complex . . . he wanted the

whole region to look at him as a grand leader.” Steve Coll,“Husayn Was Sure of

Own Survival,” Washington Post, 3 November 2003, A1.

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 65
37. Published as Saddam Husayn, Al-Umma wa-iradat al-irtiqa’ [The Nation and

the Will to Progress], (Baghdad: Dar al-hurriya li-’l-tibaa, June 1990), 23. Copy

found in DIA File 138-1-1.

38.Ibid., 19.

39.Ibid., 16, 19.

40.“Al-Ba’ath wa-l-amn al-qawmi”(The Ba’ath and national security),Al-Thawra

al-arabiya, February 1990, 60.

41.In an article authored by “The Political Section”of Hurras al-watan (Baghdad),

“Al-Amn al-qawmi wa-hisabat al-tafawwuq”[National security and calculations of

superiority], 22 April 1990, 9.

42. Sad Al-Bazzaz, Harb talid ukhra [One war engenders another], (Amman: AlAhliya li-’l-nashr wa-’l-tawzi, 1992), 202.

43.Marie Colvin,“Britain’s Gulf War Ally Helped Saddam Build Nuclear Bomb,”

Sunday Times (London), 24 July 1994, 1-2.

44. As he explained to an American interviewer his earlier threat to “burn half of

Israel,”what he had intended was that “If Israel strikes the Arabs or Iraq,Iraq will

respond. If [Israel] uses or threatens to use [nuclear weapons], it must remember

that Iraq has binary chemical weapons.” Interview with Saddam by ABC-TV

reporter Diane Sawyer, transcript in Al-Iraq (Baghdad), 30 June 1990, 3.

[Emphasis added.]

45.“Al-Ilan al-qawmi wa-tahaddiyyat al-amn al-arabi”[The national proclamation

and the challenges of Arab security], Al-Thawra al-arabiya, February 1987, 13.

46.For example, in “Taqniyat al-kiyan al-sahyuni wa-kayf nuwajihha”[The Zionist

entity’s technology and how we confront it], Al-Thawra al-arabiya,

October 1989, 84.

47. Salah Al-Mukhtar, “Suudna fi alam yahbut; tawahhudna fi alam yatanathar

66 Norman Cigar
[Our rise in a collapsing world; Our solidarity in a disintegrating world], Al-Iraq,

11 March 1990, 6.

48. Al-Umma wa-iradat al-irtiqa’, 9.

49.“Taqniyat al-kiyan al-sahyuni,” 85. A retired military officer added that “The

crime of Zionism, imperialism, and Arab reaction in striking the Iraqi nuclear

reactor was motivated by a desire to hinder the movement of development within

our reemerging and struggling region.”Abd Al-Jabbar Mahmud Al-Samarra’i,“Al

Sahyun wa-Al Saud darabu al-mufail al-nawawi al-silmi” [The Zionists and the

Saudi royal family struck the peaceful nuclear reactor], Al-Iraq, 7 June 1994, 3.

50. Fakhri Salih Al-Ani,“Saddam Husayn wa-ufuq al-thawra”[Saddam Husayn

and the revolution’s horizons], Al-Jumhuriya, 29 July 1990, 3.

51. Imad Al Jalal, “Al-Usbu al-mahalli” [The week locally], Hurras al-watan, 8

April 1990, 5.

52. Al-Umma wa-iradat al-irtiqa’, 16.

53.Ibid., 19.

54. Salah Mukhtar,“Nahnu wa-mutaghayyirat al-alam wa-sanawat al-khatar”[We,

changes in the world, and the years of danger], part 16, Al-Iraq,

11 March 1990, 6.

55. Asad Al-Khafaji, “Takhrib al-barnamaj al-nawawi ala yad Saddam” [The

destruction of the nuclear program by Saddam himself], reproduced on Al-Iraqi

Forum online at www.aliraqi.org/forums/showthread.php?t=21631.

56. A handwritten partial transcript of the speech is found in Al-Sijill al-thaqafi

[Cultural Record] of a Ba’athi Army political officer, Comrade Maj Abd Al-Latif

Ahmad Atiya Muhammad Al-Sadi, DIA File 89-2-4.

57.Based on the Iraqi version of the transcript from the meeting,“Minutes of Aziz,

Baker January 9, 1991 Geneva meeting,”part IV,Baghdad Observer (Baghdad), 13

January 1992, 2.

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 67
58.Interview with Husni Mubarak by Sad Al-Silawi,“Muqabala khassa: Al-Ra’is

al-misri Husni Mubarak” [Exclusive Interview: The Egyptian President Husni

Mubarak],Al-Arabiya TV (Abu Dhabi,UAE), 18 January 2005,transcript online

at www.alarabiya.net/program/2005/01/18/9658.html.

59. David Kay, “Iraqi Inspections: Lessons Learned,” transcript of a talk for the

Program of Nonproliferation Studies,Monterey Institute of International Studies,

10 February 1993, online at http://cns.miis.edu/research/iraq/kay.htm. Rumors

and stories about the program apparently circulated widely among relatives and

neighbors of those employees, according to the author’s wife.

60. “Lan nataraja an barnamajna al-qawmi” [We will not back down from our

national program], Hurras al-watan, May 1990, 4.

61. Staff LtGen Rad Majid Al-Hamadani, Qabl an yughadirna al-tarikh [Before

History Forgets Us], (Beirut: Al-Dar al-arabiya li-’l-ulum, 2007), 232. He was

commander of the Republican Guard 2nd Corps.

62.“Hikayat alimayn iraqiyayn wa-qunbulat Saddam al-sirriya”[The story of

two Iraqi scientists and Saddam’s secret bomb], Al-Dawliya (Paris),

3 August 1992, 16.

63. “Makhatir al-isha al-nawawi.” The author is an otherwise unidentified Staff

MajGen Kamal Muhammad Fayid, DIA File 524-1-007a.From internal evidence,

it was written no earlier than 1986.There is no indication if this briefing was ever

given, or to whom.

64.Ibid.

65.Ibid.

66.Ibid.

67.Ibid.

68. For example,see Kenneth N.Waltz,“Toward Nuclear Peace,”in Robert J. Art

68 Norman Cigar
and Kenneth N. Waltz, ed., The Use of Force: Military Power and International

Politics, 4th edition, (New York: Lanham, 1993), 527–55; Martin van Creveld,

Nuclear Proliferation and the Future of Conflict, especially the chapter “Nuclear

Weapons in the Middle East,” (New York: The Free Press, 1993), 97–153.; and

David J. Karl, “Proliferation Pessimism and Emerging Nuclear Powers,”

International Security, xxi, 3, Winter 1996/97, 87-119. Martin van Creveld

continued to adhere to this optimist position, as in “The World Can Live with a

Nuclear Iran,” Jewish Daily Forward (New York), 24 September 2007, online at

www.forward.com/articles/11673, and has argued specifically that “a nuclear Iran

will lead to a stable balance of terror between it and Israel,”interview with Martin

van Creveld by Jovan Culibrk, “Planina i njena senka” [The mountain and its

shadow], Odbrana (Belgrade), 15 March 2008, 59.

69. “America has lived for 40 years under the shadow of Soviet nuclear

weapons . . .But deterrence worked, and America surely has the power to deter Iraq

as well.And so does Israel,which has already acquired nuclear weapons.”Zbigniew

Brzezinski, “Patience in the Persian Gulf, Not War,” New York Times, 7 October

1990, online at www.nytimes.com.

70. As in John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, Can Saddam Be Contained?

History Says Yes, (Cambridge, MA: Belfer Center for Science and International

Affairs,International Security Program Occasional Paper, November 2002), online

at http://www.comw.org/qdr/fulltext/mearsheimerwalt.pdf.

71. See John Mueller,“The Essential Irrelevance of Nuclear Weapons; Stability in

the Postwar World,” International Security, xiii, 2, Autumn 1988, 55–79; John

Mueller, “Epilogue: Duelling Counterfactuals,” in John Lewis Gaddis et al, Cold

War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy Since 1945, (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1999), 272–83; and George H. Quester, Nuclear Monopoly,

(Edison, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000).

Political leaders during the Cold War itself were not always in the “optimist” camp.

Indeed, during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, President John F. Kennedy

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 69
remarked to close friends while at a party “Of course, if you think simply about the

chances of history, you have to quote the odds as somewhere near even that we

shall see an H-bomb war within the next ten years.” Katharine Graham, Personal

History,(New York: Vintage, 1998), 296. Others,while accepting the significance

of nuclear weapons in the Cold War, have also stressed the unique features which

made deterrence successful then, despite the risks of inadvertent war and escalation,

and highlighting the inadequacy of the Cold War as a deterrence model for more

recent situations, Stephen J.Cimbala,“Proliferation and Peace: An Agnostic View,”

Armed Forces & Society, xxii, 2,Winter 1995/96, 211-233.

72. For example, Keith B. Payne, The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence and a New

Direction,(Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2001); Matthew Woods,

“Reflections on Nuclear Optimism: Waltz, Burke, and Proliferation,” Review of

International Studies, xxviii, 2002, 169–89, and Henry D. Sokolski,“Nuclear 1914:

The Next Big Worry,” in Henry Sokolski, ed., Taming the Next Set of Strategic

WeaponsThreats,(Carlisle Barracks,PA: U.S.Army War College Strategic Studies

Institute, June 2006), 41–50. For an insightful analysis of such countervailing

positions, see Barry R. Schneider, “Nuclear Proliferation and CounterProliferation: Policy Issues and Debates,” Mershon International Studies Review,

xxxviii, 1994, 209-34.

73.Particularly convincing in this respect are Yair Evron,Israel’s Nuclear Dilemma,

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), and Richard L. Russell, Weapons

Proliferation and War in the Greater Middle East: Strategic Contest, (New York:

Routledge, 2005).

74. Asad Al-Khafaji,“Tawazun al-rub al-nawawi damana li-l-taawun al-silmi”

[A balance of nuclear terror is a guarantee for peaceful cooperation], Iraq alkalima (no place given), 17 February 2007, online at

www.iraqalkalema.com/article.php?id=2975.

75.Interview with Saddam by Sawyer, Al-Iraq, 30 June 1990, 3.

76. Speech by Saddam at a meeting of the Council of Ministers, “Al-Iraqiyun

70 Norman Cigar
yazdaduna tamassukan bi-tajribathim”[The Iraqis increase their devotion to their

experiment], 23 June 1981, in the Ba’ath Party’s military branch’s Al-Minhaj althaqafi li-am 1985 li-’l-ansar [Cultural Program for Members for 1985], (n.p.:

Mudiriyat al-matabi al-askariya, n.d.), 89.

77. Al-Umma wa-iradat al-irtiqa’, 16.

78. Amatzia Baram, “An Analysis of Iraqi WMD Strategy,” Nonproliferation

Review, viii, Summer 2001, 30-31.

79. Avner Cohen and Marvin Miller, Nuclear Shadows in the Middle East: Prospects

for Arms Control in the Wake of the Gulf Crisis, working paper, December 1990,

Defense and Arms Control Studies Program, Center for International Studies,

MIT, Cambridge, MA, 8.

80. Speech of 1 April 1990, Al-Sadi, Al-Sijill al-thaqafi.

81. Mahdi Obeidi, The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam’s Nuclear

Mastermind, (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2004), 135.

82. Discussion with the author, 8 January 2008. Husayn Al-Shahristani also

concluded that “if the Iraqi regime had delayed the invasion of Kuwait by just six

months it could have achieved a nuclear weapon and the equation would have

changed.”Interview with Husayn Al-Shahristani by Muadd Fayyad,“Alim dharra

iraqi”[An Iraqi nuclear scientist], Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (London), 15 April 2001, 3.

83.Interview with Staff MajGen Wafiq Al-Samarra’i by Sami Kalib,Al-Jazira TV

(Doha, Qatar), 21 February 2003, transcript online at www.aljazeera.net.

84. Al-Itiraf al-akhir, 58.

85.Ibid., 119.

86. BGen Najib Salih, in a discussion with the author, 21 October 2002.

87. Duelfer Report, 99.Two conditions which Saddam set at the meeting for Iraqi

WMD use were “if the Americans attack us with unconventional, harmful types

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 71
of weapons, or at the moment we see it feasible to attack,”ibid.The fact that some

agents were weaponized during the Gulf War is confirmed by Gen Husayn Kamil,

at one time head of Iraq’s Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization,who

acknowledged as much in an interview with United Nations officials after he had

defected to Jordan in 1995, 6; transcript of the interview at http://www.un.org/

Depts/unmovic/documents/hk.pdf.

88. The Iraqis had communicated this to the United Nations inspectors after the

Gulf War, Duelfer Report, 100.

89.Interview with Saddam by Sawyer, Al-Iraq, 30 June 1990, 3.

90. “Wazir al-difa al-iraqi yuhaddid bi-tadmir marakiz quwwat al-tahaluf” [The

Iraqi defense minister threatens the destruction of the Coalition forces’positions],

Al-Ra’y (Amman, Jordan), 12 February 1991, 20. Likewise, an unsigned article in

Al-Jumhuriya suggested that Israeli officials were frightened of Iraq’s ability to

strike Israel, and allegedly quoted one Israeli as saying that “Iraq . . . perhaps has

bombs which are equivalent in power to a small nuclear bomb.”“Al-Sawarikh aliraqiya hajis Tall Abib al-mumit”[The Iraqi missiles are Tel Aviv’s mortal fear], 27

September 1990, 12.

91. Interview with Husayn Al-Shahristani, “Saddam yukhfi al-kathir wa-yurid

taghryir kharitat al-mintaqa”[Saddam is hiding a lot and wants to change the map

of the region], Sawt Al-Kuwait (Cairo edition), 23 May 1992, 6.

92. Al-Itiraf al-akhir, 319.

93.“Al-Rad fi al-siyasa al-kharijiya,” 33-34.

94.Ibid., 33-34.

95. According to an unsigned article in the “Studies” section of the official Iraqi

Babil Online website (Baghdad), run by Saddam’s son Udayy, “Al-Siyasa alnawawiya al-sahyuniya” [Zionist nuclear policy], posted as of 6 January 2003,

online at www.iraq2000.com/online/derasat.htm

72 Norman Cigar
96.“Al-Amn al-qawmi,” 8.

97.“Al-Iraqiyun yazdaduna,” 89.

98.Ibid., 90.

99.Ibid., 90.

100.The order, in Saddam’s handwriting, and the text of the resulting leaflet

were published in Shahadat (Baghdad), 9 February 2011, online at

www.shehadaat.inp/view_printer.asp?ID=63&AUTHOR=.

101. Al-Bazzaz,“Hal yakun li-Iran silah dharri?” part 2, 20 May 1991, 5.

102. Al-Bazzaz,“Hal yakun li-Iran silah dharri,” part 1, 5.

103. Al-Bazzaz,“Hal yakun li-Iran silah dharri,” part 2, 5.

104. Al-Bazzaz,“Hal yakun li-Iran silah dharri,” part 1, 5.

105. Ali Al-Badri, “Li-madha al-ilan an imtilak Isra’il li-’l-taqniya al-nawawiya

al-an?” [Why the announcement now that Israel has nuclear technology?], AlThawra, 11 November 1991, 2.

106. “Taqrir al-istikhbarat al-sanawi li-am 1979 an Isra’il” [Annual Intelligence

Report for 1979 on Israel], Directorate of Iraqi Air Force Intelligence,Top Secret,

16, DIA File 101-6-5.

107. The alleged Israeli assessment was dated August 1982 and was distributed

within the Iraqi military in April 1983, DIA File 108-10-45.

108. Stephen Lukes, Power: A Radical View, 2nd ed., (Basingstoke, GB: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2005).

109.“Al-Amn al-qawmi,” 8.

110.“Al-Siyasa al-nawawiya al-sahyuniya.”

111. Al-Thawra al-arabiya, March 1987, 37. As an Iraqi officer put it, Israel’s

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 73
nuclear deterrence was only effective because of its “resolve to use nuclear power,”

Staff Colonel Hazim Abd Al-Qahhar Al-Rawi, “Al-Tahaddi al-nawawi al-alisra’ili: mafhum al-rad al-nawawi al-isra’ili” [The Israeli nuclear challenge: the

Israeli concept of nuclear deterrence], Al-Jumhuriya, 21 July 1991, 3.

112.“Al-Siyasa al-nawawiya al-sahyuniya.”

113.Ibid.

114.Ibid.

115.Kurrasa: Al-istikhdam al-tabawi li-aslihat al-tadmir al-shamil; Al-Mujallad althani; al-juz’ al-thani; Usus istikhdam al-asliha al-nawawiya fi al-harb [Manual:

The Operational Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction; Volume 2; Part 2; Foundations

for the Useof Nuclear Weapons in War], 3rd edition,(Baghdad: Ministry of Defense,

July 1988), DIA File 561-1-11. Henceforth referred to as Manual 470. This was

part of the regular Iraqi Army doctrinal publications series, and carried manual

number 470. As is true of doctrinal publications in most countries of the world,

there is no author identified, but only the approving authority, the Chief of Staff

of the Iraqi Army. For a more detailed study of this manual, see Norman Cigar,

Iraq’s Vision of the Nuclear Battlefield, Contributions to War Studies, Number 3,

(Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Foundation, 2003).

116. His subsequent claims to a journalist, after he had left Iraq in 1996, about

weapons of mass destruction to the effect that “such issues were not discussed in

the meetings of senior officers, and no one would mention them” ring hollow.

Ghassan Sharbal,Al-Iraq min harb ila harb: Saddam marr min huna [Iraq from War

to War: Saddam Passed by Here], (Beirut: Riyadh Al-Rayyis li’l-kutub wa’l-nashr,

2010), 177.

117. Manual 470, 40.

118.Manual 470, 2.This manual, in fact, begins by noting that“It is not far-fetched

that the Iraqi Army will take part in a future Arab-Israeli war in which the enemy

may resort to using nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction,” 2.

74 Norman Cigar
119. Manual 470, 2.

120. Manual 470, 34-35.

121. Manual 470, 38.

122. Manual 470, 38-39.

123. Manual 470, 101.

124.Kurrasat khasa’is wa-ta’thirat aslihat al-tadmir al-shamil; al-mujallad al-awwal,

al-juz’ al-rabi; al-tadrib al-asasi li-’l-wiqaya min aslihat al-tadmir al-shamil li-jami

al-sunuf [Manual on the Characteristics and Effects of Weapons of Mass Destruction;

Volume 1, Part 4; Basic Training for Defense against Weapons of Mass Destruction for

All Branches], ([Baghdad]: Office of the Chief of Staff; Department of Training;

Division of Combat Development,August 1986),Number 321, 1st ed.Circulation

Restricted to the Armed Forces, 65-66. DIA File 77-1-001. Henceforth referred

to as Manual 321.

125. Manual 321, 66

126. Manual 321, 66.

127.Briefing entitled “Ijra’atak didd al-infijar al-nawawi”[What steps you should

take against a nuclear blast], dated 25 October 1976, DIA File 130-1-1.

128. For an analysis, see Cigar, Iraq’s Vision, 11–15.

129. Manual 470, 39.

130. Manual 470, 40.

131. Kurrasa: Al-Amaliyat al-kimawiya wa-’l-ihya’iya wa-l-isha’iya [Manual:

Chemical, Biological, and Radiological Operations],([Baghdad]:Training Command,

Chemical Corps Directorate, September 1984), classified as Restricted to the

Armed Forces, DIA File 561-1-1. This manual, although a translation by Staff

Col Samim Jalal Abd Al-Latif from an unspecified foreign source,was nevertheless

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 75
part of the Iraqi doctrinal publications library and therefore part of Iraqi doctrine.

The original source was apparently from the Soviet bloc, as measures used are in

the metric system.This manual, too,was a practical guide on how to use weapons

of mass destruction on the battlefield. In effect, Iraq reportedly had also pursued

the ostensibly easier path of developing radiological weapons (“the dirty bomb”)

and had perhaps tested a prototype; see Khidir Hamza, “The Iraqi Threat,”

Testimony, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 31 July 2002.While this is not

a nuclear weapon, this capability could nevertheless be considered as sharing at

least some of the same lethal effects as nuclear weapons.

132. The briefing was prepared by LtCol Abd Al-Amir Amin Muhammad,

chemical staff officer in the 21st Infantry Division, and is entitled “Al-Istikhdam

al-tabawi li-aslihat al-tadmir al-shamil bi-siyaq al-tafil fi zhuruf al-talawwuth alkutlawi”[The operational use of weapons of mass destruction with the procedures

for their employment under conditions of WMD contamination], Restricted,

undated, DIA File 547-001-020.

133.Ibid.

134.Ibid.

135.“Al-Amn al-qawmi,” 8.

136.“Al-Siyasa al-nawawiya al-sahyuniya.”

137. According to Tariq Aziz, who represented Iraq at the Geneva meeting in

January 1991 with Secretary of State Baker: “The man said that, you see, clearly

to me in clear English.”Interview with Tariq Aziz by Ted Koppel,Nightline,ABCTV, 4 December 2002.

138. For example,there was an interview with Fa’iz Fath Abd Al-Rahim, director

of the training center of the Directorate of Civil Defense, by Nada Shawkat,which

provided rudimentary tips for survival,“Al-Asliha al-nawawiya wa-subul al-wiqaya

min israrha”[Nuclear weapons and the means to protect against their after-effects,]

Al-Jumhuriya, 12 August 1990, 9.

76 Norman Cigar
139.The initiative came from at least as high as corps level, and very probably

higher.

140.“Al-Tahdid al-amiriki bi-istimal al-asliha al-nawawiya: thalath halat li-junun

mutlaq!” [The American threat to use nuclear weapons: Three scenarios for

complete insanity], Alif Ba’, 23 December 2002, 12.Even well after the war,some

Iraqis still believed that a nuclear attack had been a possibility, Ali Al-Jaff, “Hal

kanat Amrika tukhattit li-darb Baghdad bi-’l-qunbula al-nawawiya?” [Was

America planning to strike Baghdad with an atomic bomb?],Al-Adwa’ (Baghdad),

10 June 2003, 3.

141. “Khuttat harb layliya sayfiya fi Al-Iraq qad tatahawwal li-nawawiya” [The

plan for a night and summer war in Iraq could be transformed into a nuclear one],

Babil Online, 10 January 2003, online at www.iraq2000.com/online/news4.htm

142. Charles J. Hanley, “Iraqi Officers Describe a War of Courage, Bumbling,

Despair,”Los AngelesTimes, 1 June 2003, 1, and Robert Collier,“Behind Baghdad’s

Fall,” San Francisco Chronicle, 25 May 2003, A1. Fearing a demoralizing effect,the

senior officers did not pass this warning down to their troops.

143. Post and Baram, 172. This was clearly intended to be a lesson learned for

others; my wife, at the time a neighbor of the deceased minister, remembers that

the police blocked off the street to prevent anyone from going to express their

condolences—a very public statement by Saddam’s government. As Salah Umar

Al-Ali, a member of Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council who defected, told

a reporter: “We know that opposition is impossible once Saddam Husayn takes a

decision. Any opposition is extremely costly. Saddam has an aura which prevents

those around him from drawing his attention to risks or to the possibility that he

is not right in what he intends to do.”In Sharbal, 86-7.

144.The account of this event, purportedly based on eyewitnesses, was published

by Faris Al-Katib,“Fi Karkuk . . .wa fi-ma'dubat ghada’ta’amuriya aaddaha Husayn

Kamil wa-’l-mujrim Ali Al-Kimawi saqr Al-Qadisiya Al-Bariq qal lahum: Inn

Iraqan yaqudhu atfal sudhdhaj amthalkum masiru mukhzin bi-kull al-maqayis”

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 77
[In Kirkuk . . . and in a conspiratorial lunch which Husayn Kamil and the criminal

Chemical Ali organized, the Falcon of Al-Qadisiya, Al-Bariq, said to them: An

Iraq that is run by naive children like you is destined to have a disgraceful fate by

any measure], Al-Yawm Al-Akhar (Baghdad), 16 March 2003, 3.

145.Norman Cigar, Saddam Husayn’s Road to War:Risk Assessment, Decisionmaking,

and Leadership in an Authoritarian System,Contributions to War Series, number 5,

(Quantico, VA: Marine Corps University Foundation, 2004), 22–4.

146. Unrealistically optimistic reports about the nuclear program included those

emanating from his closest aide, Husayn Kamil, as reported by Obeidi,The Bomb

in My Garden, 96–8.

147. Post and Baram, 169.

148. Arafat, hosting an Arab youth gathering in Bucharest (apparently in 1981),

had told an Iraqi who was attending: “By God,I don’t know why Saddam hasn’t

responded to the affront.What’s he waiting for?”Recounted in Abd Al-Munim

Al-Asamm,“Wa-risala ila sadiq filastini”[Another letter to a Palestinian friend],

Sawt Al-Iraq (Amsterdam), online at

www.sotaliraq.com/articles-iraq/nieuws.php?id=11324

149. Gil Hoffman,“Netanyahu: Saddam Told Me He Would Not Launch Missiles

at Us in ’98,” Jerusalem Post, 12 September 2002, 2. At the time, Binyamin

Netanyahu was prime minister of Israel.

150. DIA File 134-9-3.Elsewhere, the same order clearly identifies the “supreme

commander of the armed forces”in question as “Mr. President (may God protect

him),” that is, Saddam. Presumably, the same order also went out to other units.

Similarly, during Saddam’s trial for the Anfal campaign against the Kurds in the

late 1980s,the prosecution presented a voice recording (not further specified as to

date, place, or context) in which Saddam had said “I will take responsibility for

using chemical weapons, and no one can mount a strike without my approval.”

Reported in “Al-Hakim yushinn hujuman ala alim saudi wa-yutalib bi-surat

78 Norman Cigar
tanfidh ahkam al-idam al-sadira wa-allati satusdar”[Al-Hakim launches an attack

on a Saudi alim and demands the expeditious carrying out of the death sentences

which have been passed and which are to be passed], Al-Watan (Abha, Saudi

Arabia), 9 January 2007, online at www.alwatan.com.sa/daily/2007-01-

09/politics/politics04.htm

151. As Saddam noted to senior military commanders,“That weapon [i.e. binary

chemicals] was already present during the last year of the war, but we did not use

it against the Iranians.” Al-Sadi, Al-Sijill al-thaqafi.

152. See Norman Cigar, “Chemical Weapons and the Gulf War: The Dog That

Did Not Bark,” Studies in Conflict andTerrorism, xv, April-June 1992, 145–55, and

W. Andrew Terrill Jr.,“Chemical Weapons in the Gulf War,” Strategic Review, xiv,

Spring 1996, 51–8.

153. Interview with Khidir Hamza by Bob Edwards, National Public Radio,

Morning Edition, 27 February 2001.

154. Interview with Numan Al-Naimi, “‘Al-Iraq al-nawawi’ asrar wa-khafaya

yakshifha li-Al-Riyadh al-alim al-iraqi Numan Al-Naimi”[“A Nuclear Iraq”Secrets

which the Iraqi scientist Numan Al-Naimi reveals to Al-Riyadh], Al-Riyadh

(Riyadh), 23 January 2006, online at www.alriyadh.com

155.Al-Zaman, 5 May 2004; and interview with Husayn Al-Shahristani by Hasan

Muawwad, “Nuqtat nizham: liqa’ ma Al-Shahristani” [Point of Order: An

interview with Al-Shahristani], Al-Arabiya TV, 3 June 2004, online at

www.alarabiyya.net

156.“Takhrib al-barnamaj.”

157.The Bomb in My Garden, 135, and discussion with the author, 25 January 2008.

158.“Takhrib al-barnamaj.”

159.LtGen Fawzi Al-Shammari in a discussion with the author, 21 October 2002.

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 79
160.The transcript of the session is found in Harb talid ukhra, 169.

161. Author’s discussion with Mahdi Obeidi, 25 January 2008.

162.Editorial “Pyongyang tuhaddid bi-tahwil shibh al-jazira al-kuriya ila kawmat

ramad fi hal taziz al-intishar al-amiriki”[Pyongyang threatens to turn the Korean

Peninsula into a pile of ashes if American expansion intensifies], Babil Online, 8

February 2003, online at www.iraq2000.com/babil/archive/sat/page6.htm

163. Muhsin Khalil,“Al-Dars al-kuri”[The Korean lesson], Babil, 1 January

2003, 1.

164.Ibid.

165.“Al-Siyasa al-nawawiya al-sahyuniya.”

166. Interview by Imad Al Jalal with Staff Pilot MajGen Muzahim Sab Hasan,

“Qadirun ala tadmir ayy hadaf dakhil ‘Isra’il’” [We are capable of destroying any

target within Israel], Hurras al-watan, 22 April 1990, 17

167. See the declassified CIA Intelligence Assessment, Iraqi Ballistic Missile

Developments, July 1990,Top Secret, online at

www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/wmd03.pdf.In fact, Husayn

Kamil claimed that one missile in development, presumably Al-Abid, would

have had a range of 3,000 km, interview with United Nations officials, 9.

168.Interview with Husayn Al-Shahristani,“Alim dharra,” 3.

169.Interview with Husayn Al-Shahristani,“Al-Bahith al-nawawi,” 8

170. See A. J. Bacevich, The Pentomic Era: The U. S. Army between Korea and

Vietnam, (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1986). In those

early days, U. S. views about a nuclear battlefield were noticeably sanguine in their

optimism and certainty, as reflected in the nuclear exercises conducted and in the

opinions expressed by military and civilian leaders, ibid., 112–115.

171. See William R. Van Cleave and S. T. Cohen, Tactical Nuclear Weapons: An

80 Norman Cigar
Examination of the Issue,(New York: Crane,Russak, 1978), 3–9.For a more updated

overview of nuclear weapons in U. S. strategy, see Amy F. Woolf, U. S. Strategic

Nuclear Forces: Background, Developments, and Issues, (Washington, DC:

Congressional Research Service, 14 July 2009).

172. On Vietnam during the Johnson Administration, see Peter Hayes and Nina

Tannenwald,“Nixing Nukes in Vietnam,”Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, lix,MayJune 2003, 52–9, and on Vietnam during the Nixon Administration see William

Burr and Jeffrey Kimball, eds.,“Nixon White House Considered Nuclear Options

against North Vietnam, Declassified Documents Reveal,” National Security

Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 195, 31 July 2006, online at

www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB195/index.htm

173. See the White House’s National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass

Destruction, (Washington, DC: n.p., December 2002), and the Chairman, Joint

Chiefs of Staff, National Military Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction,

(Washington, DC: n.p., 13 February 2006). On discussions of potential use against

Iran, see Seymour M. Hersh, “Last Stand: The Military’s Problem with the

President’s Iran Policy,”The New Yorker, 10 July 2006, 42–9.

174. On these elements of Soviet nuclear doctrine, see Scott and Scott, 63–75.

175. See Mary C. FitzGerald, “Marshal Ogarkov and the New Revolution

in Soviet Military Affairs,” Defense Analysis, iii, March 1987, 3–19; Battilega,

“Soviet Views,” 156-57, and John M. Thompson, “From Strategic Defense to

Deterrence:The Evolution of Soviet Nuclear Strategy Since 1962,”in Col Carl W.

Reddel, USAF, ed., Transformation in Russian and Soviet Military History,

(Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1990), 293–308.For an account of

the period in the context of the declining emphasis on nuclear weapons in both the

United States and the Soviet Union, during the tenure of President Ronald

Reagan and Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, respectively, see Jonathan Schell, The

Seventh Decade;The New Shapeof Nuclear Danger,(New York: Metropolitan Books,

2007), 184–201.

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 81
176. The textbook in question was Al-Asliha al-kutlawiya: li-tullab al-kulliya alaskariya [Weapons of Mass Destruction: For the Students of the Military Academy],

forward by Chemical Branch Maj Adnan Jawad Ali, (no further publishing

information provided), 52, DIA File 539-1-3. The original source of the

illustration was the Department of the Army Field Manual FM21-41, Soldier’s

Manual for Defense against CBR Attack,(Washington, DC: GPO,April 1953), 134.

177.“Preconceptions cannot be abolished; it is in one sense just another word for

‘model’or ‘paradigm’—a construct used to simplify reality,which any thinker needs

in order to cope with complexity.”Richard K.Betts,“Analysis,War, and Decisions:

Why Intelligence Failures Are Inevitable,” World Politics, xxxi,

October 1978, 83-4.

178. In his seminal work on decision making frameworks, drawing from

psychology, he notes insightfully that “once a person has conceived of a problem

in a given way, it is very hard to break out of his pattern of thought. Information,

rather than calling the established subgoal into question,will be interpreted within

the old framework.” Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International

Politics, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 41

179. Interview with Saddam by Sawyer, Al-Iraq, 30 June 1990, 3. Indicative that

this had become a routine policy position is the fact that Saddam continued to

raise the possibility even after the invasion of Kuwait, as in his interview with

Japanese journalists on 20 October 1990, reprinted in the collection Saddam

Husayn sani wahdat Al-Iraq, 23.

180. Quoted in Sabah Al-Lami,“Innaha bidayat asr jadid fi al-mintaqa al-arabiya”

[This is the beginning of a new era in the Arab world], Hurras al-watan, 8 April

1990, 9.

181.“Al-Amn al-qawmi,” 9.

182. Kamil,“Al-Sahayina yatarifun,”Al-Jumhuriya, 17 September 1990.

183.“Al-Amn al-qawmi,” 9.

82 Norman Cigar
184.Interview with Saddam by Sawyer, Al-Iraq, 30 June 1990, 3

185. Speech by Saddam, in Al-Sijill al-thaqafi li-am1990, DIA File 500-2-37.

186.“Al-Siyasa al-nawawiya al-sahyuniya.”

187. “Nass al-mu’tamar al-suhufi alladhi aqadahu Tariq Aziz” [Text of the press

conference which Tariq Aziz held], Al-Iraq, 10 January 1991, 5.

188.The Bomb in My Garden, 135.Numan Al-Naimi confirms this in Al-Itiraf alakhir, 116, as does Khidir Hamza, Saddam’s Bombmaker, 239-40. Hamza reports

that the Iraqi leadership wanted to mount at least one nuclear warhead on a missile

at that time, although this still would not have meant a theater-level

capability, ibid.

189. For example, Iraq’s military press highlighted North Korea’s refusal of

inspections in 1994, “Kuriya Al-Shamaliya tarfud nida’ ‘Majlis al-amn’ li-taftish

mansha’atha al-nawawiya” [North Korea refuses the call by the Security Council

to inspect its nuclear facilities], Al-Qadisiya, 5 April 1994, 2. Likewise, Pakistan’s

resistance to U.S. pressure was monitored, “Al-Dughut al-amirikiya hal tamna

Pakistan min imtilak al-taqniya al-nawawiya?” [Will American pressure prevent

Pakistan from acquiring nuclear technology?], Al-Thawra, 3 June 1994, 3.

190. See Post and Baram, 184–6.

191. Duelfer Report, i, 26.

192. E-mail to the author, 26 January 2008.

193. Interview with George Piro by Scott Pelley, “Interrogator Shares Saddam’s

Confessions,” 60 Minutes, CBS News, 27 January 2008.

194. Duelfer Report, ii, part 2, 6.

195. See Mahdi Obeidi, “Saddam, The Bomb and Me,” New York Times, 26

September 2004, online at www.nytimes.com.

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 83
196. See, for example, Peter Slavin, John Lancaster, and Kamran Khan,“At

Least 7 Nations Tied to Pakistani Nuclear Ring,” Washington Post, 8 February

2004, A1, A22; and Joby Warrick,“Nuclear Program in Iran Tied to Pakistan,”

Washington Post, 21 December 2003, A1, A36.In fact, according to David

Albright and Corey Hinderstein, of the Institute for Science and International

Security, A. Q. Khan had already approached Iraq in 1990 with nuclear weapon

designs.“Documents Indicate A. Q. Khan Offered Nuclear Weapon Designs to

Iraq in 1990: Did He Approach Other Countries?” online at

www.isis-online.org/publications/southasia/khan_memo.html.

197.Joby Warrick and Peter Slavin,“Libyan Arms Designs Traced Back to China,”

Washington Post, 15 February 2004, A1.

198. According to a study prepared for Congress, “As regional fears of Iraq have

eased and sympathy for the Iraqi people has grown, the United States has had

difficulty persuading regional governments to enforce the sanctions regime . . .

Improving sanctions enforcement by Iraq’s neighbors was dropped from the U.S.

targeted-sanctions proposals adopted in Resolution 1409 because of regional

resistance.” Kenneth Katzman, Iraq: Compliance, Sanctions, and U.S. Policy, CRS

Issue Brief for Congress, (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 10

December 2002), 11.

199. “France, Russia, and China have generally sought to ease sanctions in order

to give Iraq incentives to cooperate with the international community.”Ibid., 11.

Also see Kenneth Katzman, Iraq: Oil-for-Food Program, International Sanctions,

and IllicitTrade,Report for Congress,(Washington, DC: Congressional Research

Service, 26 September 2002), and Anthony H. Cordesman, Iraq and the War of

Sanctions Conventional Threats and Weapons of Mass Destruction, (Westport, CT.:

Praeger, 1999).

200. See the case for such an approach in Alexander L. George, “The Need for

Influence Theory and Actor-Specific Behavioral Models of Adversaries,” in

Schneider and Post, 271–310.For an informative comparative regional example of

84 Norman Cigar
the importance of the context in understanding a specific case of a leader’s

pursuit—and ultimate abandonment—of nuclear weapons, see Maalfrid BrautHegghammer, “Libya’s Nuclear Turnaround: Perspectives from Tripoli,” Middle

East Journal, lxii, 1,Winter 2008, 55–72.

201. Alastair Iain Johnston, “Thinking about Strategic Culture,” International

Security, xix, 4, Spring 1995, 34.By the same token,focusing on a country’s strategic

culture need not replace the threat/interest-based realistic approach, but enrich it

and add flexibility to its application in concrete cases. See Michael C. Desch,

“Culture Clash: Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies,”

International Security, xxiii, 1, Summer 1998, 141–70.

202. One of the points which Mark T. Clark highlights is that one cannot assume

that emerging nuclear powers have learned from the experience of others or from

existing literature in order to avoid mistakes, “Small Nuclear Powers,” in

Getting MAD, 279.

203.Barry R. Schneider,“Deterring International Rivals from War and Escalation,”

in Know Thy Enemy, 4–10.

204. Staff BGen Kanan Khurshid Abd Al-Wahhab,“Khasa’is wa-makhatir al-silah

al-nawawi” [The characteristics and risks of nuclear weapons], Al-Majalla alaskariya, xxv, 2, April 1988, 101.

205. Perhaps the most forceful such argument was that by Martin van Creveld,

TheTransformation of War:The Most Radical Reinterpretation of Armed Conflict Since

Clausewitz, (New York: Free Press, 1991).

206. See, for example, the incisive analysis by S. Paul Kapur, Dangerous Deterrent:

Nuclear Weapons Proliferation and Conflict in South Asia, (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 2007), 169ff.

207.Ibid., 176.

208.The results of the conference were compiled by Todd S.Sechser, South Asia and

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 85
the Nuclear Future: Rethinking the Causes and Consequences of Nuclear Proliferation,

(Carlisle Barracks, PA: U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, May

2005), 3.

209. Nina Tannenwald, “The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the

Normative Basis of Nuclear Non-Use,”International Organization, lviii, 3, Summer

1999, 435.

210.William J. Broad,“Details Emerge of Cold War Nuclear Threat by Cuba,”

New York Times, 22 September 2009, online at

www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/science/22nuke.html?pagewanted=print

211. Abd Al-Wahhab, 101.

212. Abd Al-Wahhab, 92.It is improbable that this general intended to be critical

of Saddam, given the regime’s well-known harshness in dealing with any

perceived dissidents.

213. On the potential impact on further proliferation if Iran goes nuclear, see

Patrick Clawson, “Proliferation in the Middle East: Who Is Next after Iran?” in

Henry Sokolski, ed., Taming the Next Set of Strategic Weapons Threats (Carlisle

Barracks,PA: U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute,June 2006), 27–

39. In another case, North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons opened a

debate on a more assertive security policy in Japan, to include a consideration of

acquiring its own nuclear capability, something that would have been unheard-of

even in the recent past. Doug Struck, “Japan’s Pacifism Eroded by Threat,”

Washington Post, 15 February 2003, A22, A30.

214. The resolution of regional disputes as a way to counter nuclear proliferation

is a key theme in Joseph Cirincione, Bomb Scare:The History and Future of Nuclear

Weapons, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

215.Interview with Husayn Al-Shahristani,“Saddam haddad saqafan zamaniyan

li-intaj qunbula dharriya al-am 1991”[Saddam set a time limit of 1991 to develop

an atom bomb], part 1, Al-Mu’tamar (London), 12 February 2001, 8.

86 Norman Cigar
216.Interview with Jafar Diya’Jafar by Ali Burdi,“La aslihat damar fi Al-Iraq wakhassabna al-uraniyum wahdana am 1990” [There are no weapons of [mass]

destruction in Iraq, and we enriched uranium by ourselves in 1990], Al-Nahar

(Beirut), 10 March 2004, online at www.annahar.com Elsewhere, however, Jafar

Diya’Jafar estimated that Saddam “was probably a few years away from producing

a nuclear bomb,” interview with Jafar Diya’ Jafar, “Iraq Ended Nuclear Aims in

1991,”BBC News, 25 September 2000.

217. See the interview with Husayn Al-Shahristani by Muadd Fayyad, “Alim

dharra iraqi: tujad mansha’at nawawiya sirriya fi batin Jabal Himrin bi-’l-Iraq lam

yaktashifha al-mufattishun al-dawliyun” [Iraqi nuclear scientist: There are secret

nuclear facilities inside Jabal Himrin in Iraq, which the international inspectors

did not discover], Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, 15 April 2001, 3. However, elsewhere, he

estimated that it would have taken until 1992 to have had enough enriched

uranium for a bomb, and until late 1992 or early 1993 for a second one, AlMu’tamar, 12 February 2001, 8.

218. Cited in John Burns, “A Top Iraqi Aide Defies U.S. to Find Proof of

Weapons,” New York Times, 9 December 2002, A1.

219. Discussion by the author with Mahdi Obeidi, 25 January 2008.

220. David Kay,“Denial and Deception Practices of WMD Proliferators:Iraq and

Beyond,”The Washington Quarterly,Winter 1995, 85.

221. Imad Khadduri, Iraq’s Nuclear Mirage; Memoirs and Delusions (Toronto:

Springhead Publishers, 2003), 122, and interview with Numan Al-Naimi, “‘AlIraq al-nawawi’ asrar wa-khafaya yakshifha li-Al-Riyadh al-alim al-iraqi Numan

Al-Naimi” [“A nuclear Iraq” secrets which the Iraqi scientist Numan Al-Naimi

reveals to Al-Riyadh], Al-Riyadh, 23 January 2006, online at www.alriyadh.com.

222. See the declassified CIA Intelligence Assessment, Iraqi Ballistic Missile

Developments, July 1990,Top Secret, 14, online at

www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/wmd03.pdf.

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 87
Norman Cigar is director of regional studies and a Minerva Research Chair holder

at the Marine Corps University, Quantico,Virginia.Before retiring, he was on the

staff of the Marine Corps Command and Staff College and the Marine Corps

School of Advanced Warfighting, where he taught military theory, strategy and

policy, military history, and regional studies. Previously, he was a senior politicalmilitary analyst in the Pentagon,where he was responsible for the Middle East in

the Office of the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, and supported the

Secretary of the Army, the Chief of Staff of the Army, and Congress with

intelligence. He also represented the Army on national-level intelligence issues

with the interagency intelligence community. During the Gulf War, he was the

Army’s senior political-military intelligence staff officer on the Desert

Shield/Desert Storm Task Force.

He is the author of numerous works on politics and security issues dealing with the

Middle East and the Balkans, and has been a consultant at the International

Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at the Hague. He has also taught at

the National Defense Intelligence College, was a visiting fellow at the Institute

for Conflict Analysis & Resolution, George Mason University, and is a senior

associate with the Public International Law and Policy Group. He is now focusing

on the strategic and military aspects of radical Islamic movements and on

proliferation issues.

Dr. Cigar holds a D. Phil. from Oxford (St. Antony’s College) in Middle East

History and Arabic; a Master of International Affairs degree from the School of

International and Public Affairs, and a Certificate from the Middle East Institute,

Columbia University; and a Master of Science of Strategic Intelligence degree

from the National Defense Intelligence College. He has studied and traveled

widely in the Middle East.

Saddam Hussein’s Nuclear Vision 89

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