Part 1: Beginnings
Author’s Note:
The debate over Iraq’s nuclear capabilities and whether or not they were a serious threat to the US, has polarized the world, and American politics. The central issue at stake is whether or not war on Iraq was justified and whether or not the American people were lied to. While biological and chemical weapons were also at issue, Bush administration officials presented the distinctly alarming specter of an imminent nuclear threat, which could arrive in the form of a “mushroom cloud” if America hesitated to take action.
Dr. Imad Khadduri was a top scientist involved in Iraq’s nuclear program from 1968 until the end of 1998, when he was able to escape. He now serves as a network administrator in Toronto, Canada. This is his life story, and the story of what really happened inside the Iraqi nuclear program as told by Khadduri and other officials in interviews, and in the advance release of Khadduri’s memoirs, which will be available in American bookstores in December.
It was on a mild autumn evening in 1968 that Imad Khadduri first received the invitation that would change his life.Sitting in an open-air café near the Tigris River, Khadduri was absorbed in a game of backgammon, when Basil al-Qaisi, a close friend from high school, approached him.
Imad Khadduri, Basil al-Qaisi and Dhafir Selbi in Salah al-Din, 1961
Basil had already heard that Khadduri recently returned from the United States where he had been studying nuclear physics. Basil sipped his tea then asked, “Why don’t you join us here at the Nuclear Research Center? Our friends are already working there, Jafar Dhia Jafar, Nazar Al Ouraishi and others.”
Khadduri was intrigued: “I was not aware that the Russians had built a two Mega Watt research reactor at Tuwaitha, twenty kilometers.
After taking a look at the research projects underway, Khadduri joined his former high school colleagues who were working with several International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) sponsored scientists in the group.
The Nuclear Research Center was headed by the Iraqi scientist Jafar Dhia Jafar who had finished his nuclear physics PhD in record time from the University of Birmingham, England just a few years earlier.
Ghazi Darwish, a prominent chemist, directed the meetings of the Nuclear Research Center (NRC), whose membership numbered around 120.
Khadduri recalls the meetings, which included scientific lectures and managerial planning, as having an atmosphere “fragrant with enthusiasm, drive and high hopes.”
Early in the summer of 1969, after spending several months doing research, Khadduri decided it was time to complete his PhD.
He then planned to return to the United States to rejuvenate his doctoral work in nuclear physics, that he had dropped earlier in 1967. Khadduri had been studying at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.
Khadduri’s identity card from Brookhaven National Laboratories, Upton, New York, 1967.
A turn of events would mean that Khadduri would resume his studies in England instead.
Young scholar in Britain
During a London stopover, he headed to University of Birmingham to visit with friends, including Mohammed Mikdashi, a Lebanese friend with whom Khadduri had shared housing during his last years at the University of Michigan.
Mikdashi had followed his PhD supervisor’s transfer to the University of Birmingham and was working on completing his own thesis there.
“Why don’t you stay here at the University of Birmingham?” Mohammed suggested. “They have recently opened a new Masters of Science course in Nuclear Reactor Technology, and it does have reputable professors”
The next day, Khadduri met with Dr. T. Derek Beynon, lecturer in the Reactor Physics Group in the (then) Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Birmingham.
Dr. Beynon was particularly impressed with a letter of recommendation from Jafar Dhia Jafar that Khadduri was carrying in his coat pocket.
Beynon explained that Jafar had finished his PhD at the same Physics and Astronomy Department four years ago, and had made a lasting impression with his completion of a PhD thesis in minimum time. The subject? Strong nuclear interactions.
A year later, Jafar, who was at that time was the head of the Physics Department at the Nuclear Research Institute and a member of the top level Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, was offered a job at the Physics Department at the University of Birmingham, by Professor Burcham, the Head of the Physics and Astronomy Department.
Jafar instead returned to Baghdad but left shortly thereafter to join an international research team of scientists embarking on a complex nuclear physics experiment at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland.
Khadduri was quickly accepted into the University of Birmingham PhD program, his immediate supervisor being Malcolm Scott, the Senior Lecturer and Supervisor of the Masters of Science course in Reactor Physics and Technology.
Four Iraqi students were enrolled for the Reactor Technology Masters course in 1969: Tariq al-Hamami, Abdallah Kendoush, Riyadh Yahya Zaki and Khadduri, all on Iraqi government scholarships.
Khadduri wound up the sole choice of the university to continue on to a PhD, which he earned in December 1973.
Peaceful nuclear research
Khadduri then rejoined the Nuclear Research Center at Tuwaitha in the first week of January 1974.
On the same day, Khalid Said, a PhD physicist who had studied in the England, had also started his work there and was immediately assigned to be the head of the Nuclear Research Center, reportedly due to his prominent Ba’athist status.
Khadduri had severed his own party connection in 1962.
Muyasser al-Mallah, a fellow University of Michigan physicist, was by then head of the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission.
Eager to focus on research rather than administration, Khadduri joined Mansoor Ammar and Muqdam Ali in the Reactor Department.
It was at a scientific conference later that year (1974) that Khadduri would discover the detectors he worked on in England could be used to locate subterranean uranium deposits.
He immediately proposed a project to search for uranium in Iraq.
Khalid Said approved, and provided Omran Mousa -a “faithful and devoted” driver, a vehicle, communication equipment, official papers, soldiers and finance.
A Bedouin guide later joined the entourage, as it ventured into more remote terrain.
Searching for uranium in the mountains
Khadduri prospecting for uranium near Hero, 1976
Khadduri began his search in the northeast mountains near the Iranian border, close to a Kurdish village called Hero.”I would have 50 soldiers spread around in a circular formation, with me at the center, fanning along with me as I planted the [detectors],” he recalls. “The yellow uranium ore was even visible on the surface.”
The group then headed south and spent several months in the barren desert of Jil, on the Iraqi-Saudi border Siroor Mirza, the head of the geology department at the Nuclear Research Institute, accompanied Khadduri’s entourage and provided detailed maps indicating possible uranium deposits in the middle of the desert.
Later, near the city of al-Qaim near the Syrian border Khadduri and company “struck it rich.”
The results of preliminary tests indicated heavy uranium concentrations near an area
A city then arose around a phosphate production plant that was built there.
One of the plant’s buildings was for the extraction of uranium ore in the form of yellowcake.
“The extracted by-product would later be transported by rail north to the al-Jazeera nuclear site, near Mosul,” Khadduri recalls.
There, a processing plant was located, which required yellowcake as feed material in order to produce pure nuclear grade uranium dioxide, which in turn was chlorinated to produce uranium tetrachloride.
This was the “feed material” for the “Baghdatrons” -a name derived from Calutron (which in turn derives from the contraction of CALifornia University cyclotRON).
The “Baghdatrons” were central parts of a machine process used primarily for production of Iraq’s weapon grade uranium 235.
Many months later, Khadduri returned to the Nuclear Research Center with his findings, which he summarized in a report titled, On the Use of Cellulose Nitrate Film in Uranium Exploration.
Jafar returns
Jafar Dhia Jafar, on the left, scientific head of the nuclear weapons program. Khadduri in center, 1997.
At the urging of Khalid Said, Khadduri wrote a letter to Jafar Dhia Jafar, urging him to return to Iraq.Jafar was still working in Switzerland with over a hundred nuclear scientists on the nuclear physics project being implemented at CERN, Geneva.
He agreed to quit his post at CERN, return to Iraq with his English wife Phyllis, and rejoin the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission.
The first Iraqi International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy was held in Baghdad in the spring of 1975, under the coordination of Hamid
Khadduri, who was in charge of the reactor technology sector, oversaw the evaluation of the submitted papers and allotted the time for them.
His attention was immediately drawn to Yehya al-Meshad, Egyptian nuclear reactor scientist, whose expertise in nuclear reactor technology and gift for expressing complex principles with clarity was evidenced in ten papers submitted for the conference.
Al-Meshad was on sabbatical leave from Alexandria University in Egypt and was seeking a teaching position at the University of Technology in Baghdad.
He subsequently won a 2-year contract, which ended in1977 -at which point he was hired by the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission and became a prime mover in the program.
Meanwhile, Malcolm Scott suggested that the Iraqis start a one-year Reactor Technology Master of Science course based on the material that he had developed for his course at Birmingham University in England.
Scott said that he would be willing to accept any graduate student of the course, for a PhD program at Birmingham University –solely on Khadduri’s recommendation.
Coordinating with the University of Baghdad, the Master of Science course in Nuclear Reactor Technology debuted the following fall with two enrollees.
“The students were completely under our guidance at the Nuclear Research Institute, but their degrees would be conferred by the Physics Department at the University of Baghdad,” said Khadduri.
Dabbling with critical mass
“I also engaged [al-Meshad] in developing a computer program, or code, to calculate the burn-up of the reactor’s nuclear fuel instead of depending on the simplified hand calculated formulas that were left to us by the Russians,” Khadduri said.
“Our code and calculations opened up the possibility of calculating critical mass, the correct density at which a highly enriched uranium 235 sphere would undergo a self-sustaining chain reaction; this could become a reactor, if controlled, and an atomic bomb, if uncontrolled.”
The duo’s work on code yielded yet another co-authored report: CORELOAD: A Computer Code for Calculating the Evolution of the Operation History of the IRT-2000 Reactor.
Khalid Said and Jafar Dhia Jafar were supportive of the efforts.
Implosion scenarios
Khadduri and Yehya al-Meshad also started dabbling with different “implosion scenarios” that would start with a smaller spherical sphere of uranium but would increase its density to a critical value.
“This fissioning process is rapidly repeated, in a very short time, in a self-sustained chain reaction. The bomb explodes, releasing intense amounts of energy and radioactive fission products, “said Khadduri.
Khadduri’s and al-Meshad’s calculations matched the experimental results carried out in the forties for the Manhattan Project, and were then written up in report No. NR-14: The Use of Multigroup Transport Method for Criticality Calculations of Some Fast Spherical Assemblies.
Plutonium 239
Having mastered the tools for calculating the burn-up rate of the nuclear fuel in the reactor Jafar and Khadduri then jointly carry out a detailed calculation on the possible production of weapons grade fissionable plutonium 239 from the operation of the Russian reactor’s fuel –”a long shot” according to Khadduri.
Plutonium 239 constitutes the core of another type of atomic bomb.
“With our low power research reactor, it would have taken decades to obtain the required amount of nuclear weapon grade plutonium,” states Khadduri, “The relevance of the work, however, was the knowledge of the required calculations.”
Those calculations would form yet another Khadduri nuclear report: The Possible Production of Pu239 from the IRT-5000 Reactor, co-authored with Jafar.
Power generating plant
Mr. Ito, in the centre, and the Mitsubishi team, 1977
Iraq moved forward in 1976 and 1977, with its intentions of acquiring a nuclear electric power generating plant.The Iraqi team visited several nuclear power plants in Japan (Mitsubishi), Sweden (ASEA Atom) and West Germany (Kraftwerk Union AG).
Khadduri was part of the team that met with and negotiated with the suppliers’ delegations.
Negotiations with Mitsubishi at their headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, seemed particularly promising.
“We were nearing the end of it, when…Mr. Ito, the head of the Japanese delegation, excused himself after [someone whispered] in his ear. He went out for five minutes, and returned to declare the end of the negotiations,” said Khadduri.
Westinghouse, American supplier for nuclear fuel for most Western and Japanese nuclear power stations, had just called to refuse supply of nuclear fuel to Iraq.
The scientists would soon head to Paris in a top-level government delegation, to negotiate the purchase of two nuclear reactors from France. The purchase would lead to a number of international intrigues including an assassination in Paris, and the eventual bombing of the reactors by Israeli jets, in what was the first strike against Iraq based on the politically controversial doctrine of “preemption.”
Photos copyrighted and supplied by Dr. Imad Khadduri
Next up – Part 2: Assasination in Paris, Israel attacks, Hurtling towards the bomb
Note: Dr. Khadduri’s new book, titled Iraq’s Nuclear Mirage: Memoirs and Delusions should be available in American bookstores at the end of December.
The author has agreed to ship copies out himself to Etherzone readers who want to obtain a copy of the book now. Signed copies are also available and inquiries should be directed to Dr. Khadduri via his website: Iraq’s Nuclear Mirage.
“Published originally at EtherZone.com : Republication in whole or in part is expressly prohibited without prior permission from the author or publisher.