Visit to Manhattan

Interesting piece in the Guardian today about how the U.S. tried to start up a nuclear program in Iraq in the '50's under Eisenhower but ended up giving it to Iran due to the Iraqi socialist revolution of 1958. Snippet:

Khadduri, a senior scientist in the Iraqi bomb effort who left his homeland in 1998, describes the quest for technology in a new, self-published book, ``Iraq's Nuclear Mirage,'' available via online booksellers. When Iraq mounted a crash program in 1987 to build a bomb, he was named to coordinate scientific documentation. At the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission library at Tuwaitha, south of Baghdad, he determined the government had received U.S. reference material as an Atoms for Peace gift in 1956, when Iraq was a British-allied monarchy. Card indexes indicated the material included some 30 Manhattan Project books and reports, but didn't say where they were. ``It took me several days of searching for the keys of forgotten attics and storage rooms in the library building,'' he recounts. ``In one of them I found a box that was probably not opened since the 1960s.'' It held the Manhattan Project material. Khadduri then found more U.S. documents in other locations. The Iraqi physicists focused on the calutron, a device for separating out fissionable uranium for reactor fuel - or bombs - by using electromagnetic isotope separation, an American technique of the 1940s that later bombmakers disdained. ``We were the only people who made use of the calutron, as far as I know. It was a huge exercise, using huge amounts of electricity,'' Khadduri said in a telephone interview from Toronto, where he lives. Key to the exercise were 164 patents relating to the calutron, noted in references in the literature. Khadduri didn't have the designs themselves, but he knew where to find them. Enlisting an Iraqi diplomat's help, he tapped the resources of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, repository of all world patents. ``He used Iraqi students in Geneva,'' Khadduri said of his partner. ``I would send him a list of 20 or 30 items, with a couple of calutron patents thrown in, and the students would go by WIPO and collect them.'' They soon accumulated all the patents, including equipment designs down to minute details, and Iraqi teams built their own calutrons, dubbed ``Baghdadtrons,'' at Tarmiya, north of Baghdad. The work was difficult, but they were slowly producing bomb material until Tarmiya was bombed in the 1991 war. In his Atoms for Peace speech on Dec. 8, 1953, Eisenhower said he hoped to ``hasten the day when fear of the atom will begin to disappear.'' The underlying U.S. goal was to head off a commercial and propaganda challenge from the Soviet Union's nuclear establishment. By 1954, the United States was training foreigners in nuclear science and had declassified hundreds of nuclear studies. In 1955 in Geneva, a U.S.-sponsored conference on peaceful nuclear energy drew 25,000 participants and distributed truckloads of declassified material.

So, there seems to be a slight implication buried somewhere in this story that maybe, just maybe, the U.S may possibly be a tiny bit responsible for the massive proliferation of nuclear materials technology throughout the world. Good thing we invaded and decimated Iraq this year to halt the spread of nuclear technology to terrorist organizations. Stopping the nuclear weapons facilities stockpile program plans paperwork ideas thoughts was indeed a brave and noble action by the Bush Administration.