December 21, 2004
Atomic Punk
A review of The Bomb in My Garden, by Mahdi Obeidi
by Jennifer Heyne
Private Papers

In the recently published The Bomb In My Garden, Mahdi Obeidi and Kurt Pitzer tell the tale of Obeidi’s exploits as the lead scientist in charge of Saddam Hussein’s centrifuge program, a key component of uranium enrichment. The book raises the question of Saddam’s access to WMD, an unsolved mystery and so the subject of resolved speculation. The Right claims the WMDs—procurements, designs, and actual warheads of mass destruction—must surely have been transported to an eager Syria or is otherwise still hidden in undiscovered places in Iraq that evade the best efforts of even Charles Duelfer and the Iraq Security Group. The Left believes that there were never real WMDs and so sanction the Duelfer Report as evidence that war was a clear mistake. Worse yet, the Left continues: “knowing” this, the Bush Administration thus “lied” to our citizenry taking U.S. soldiers into an unjustified and unnecessary war.

Since Obeidi headed Hussein’s centrifuge program—which would allow the Iraqis to enrich uranium into weapons grade material—The Bomb In My Garden seems a sound beginning for an inquiry into the extent of Saddam’s program. How close was the dictator to launching a nuclear warhead? Did he have deadly chemical and biological stashes? Now seems a good time to re-examine such questions since the question of WMDs seems to have dropped from the 24-hour news cycle, and as our troops are employed in the more difficult tasks to rebuild Iraq and rid Iraqi society of a festering insurgency. Did an arsenal of WMDs ever or even potentially exist? Or, as Saddam postured before the international community in televised interviews and in demonstrations of military prowess, was it simply the case that the emperor had no clothes, that he either misled us or was misled himself?

The Bomb in My Garden provides a bird’s-eye view of how Iraqi scientists and leaders searched the world to find the necessary procurements—magnets, pipes, vacuum valves—and designs for a secret weapons program. It is equally an account of how that program was dismantled through the relentless efforts of UN inspectors after Operation Desert Storm. The book is most absorbing in chapters like “Saddam’s Grip” and “Shopping in Europe”—Obeidi recounts how he and other Western-trained Iraqi scientists, in the 1980s, traveled to Europe and the U.S. to accumulate the knowledge to build a centrifuge. He consulted scientific works on magnetic centrifuges at the University of Virginia, posed as the Iraqi Ministry of Oil to purchase a cadence program from a New York company, negotiated to buy components and materials from German companies, purchased magnets from Austrian Treibacher corporation, and procured designs for machining tools from Swiss scientists.

Clear from the shopping list of bomb parts is that Iraqis built their nuclear technology from scratch. Obeidi claims it was a necessary step to avoid international attention on the program. Through his own diligence, and threats and forced confinement by the Baathist government, by 1990, Obeidi had created a centrifuge prototype from which he began to build a nuclear weapons plant for uranium enrichment. If he could enrich uranium, Iraq would be but a wink and nod from a nuclear weapon—the International Atomic Energy Agency today is monitoring Iran specifically to stop them from uranium enrichment. According to Obeidi, the First Gulf War interrupted his own progress and so must be seen as a timely intervention.

“Nuclear Hide-and-Seek” is the high point of the narrative. Iraqi scientists, engineers, and workers scrambled to hide technology, weapons, and even the scientists themselves from IAEA inspectors. The truce signed in 1991 brought UN weapons inspectors into Iraq to dismantled nuclear and biological weapons programs, but with great resistance and deception on the part of Iraqi scientists. Iraqis kept Obeidi’s identity hidden from UN inspectors until 1998, when the inspectors finally left the country. Weapons inspectors, arriving unannounced, swarmed the Rashdiya facility where the centrifuge had been under construction. The raid was largely successful: the factory was dismantled, its components destroyed, and its records confiscated—except for the actual plans to develop the centrifuge, which Obeidi had taken home earlier and later buried in his garden. That is the real story of the "bomb."

Clear from Obeidi’s tale is that Western nations like France, Germany, England, Switzerland and the United States were important sources of information and some high-tech companies proved reliable sources of parts. Not surprisingly, Obeidi crafts a tale of espionage and sinister capitalists for whom business concerns comfortably breached national allegiance. He impresses upon us not only that a nuclear weapons program needs the resources of a state for development, but also that it is an incredibly long and arduous operation to develop nuclear weapons, both expensive and relatively easy to spot. So, what he buried in his back yard was a cookbook on how to start uranium enrichment from the ground up.

There really was no bomb in the garden. But in spite of the scary title for the book, Obeidi and Pitzer seem to offer a broader message. Saddam always had the intent to develop nuclear weapons. Obeidi asks, “Would Saddam have tried to build nuclear weapons again. . .? One can only imagine he would have.” Given the dictator’s record, little is left to imagination. In fact, Saddam’s son Qusay was on the Oversight Committee for the centrifuge; thus the world would have had inevitably another generation of would-be nuclear rogues.

Obeidi and Pitzer try to pad the story in a variety of ways so there is a little something for all political appetites. Nuclear capabilities are destroyed, but Saddam’s ambitions remain constant. A brutal dictatorship is rife with paranoia and bloodshed—especially interesting is the fate of Hussein Kamal, Saddam’s wayward son-in-law who sadly chooses to return from Jordan after selling Saddam down the road—but the U.S. invasion is chaotic and poorly executed in the last chapter “The Time Capsule.” So if Obeidi is critical of Saddam and his family of goons, he is also frustrated by the efforts of American soldiers and intelligence agents who can’t seem to coordinate their invasion of Iraq. So, written to gain the maximum readership, the book is really a political pastiche to please all, and, not surprisingly, published right before the election in 2004. However, implicit in the text is the Leftist belief that Saddam needed to go, but George Bush had failed to execute the war properly: he refused to wait for UN sanction and he failed to plan the war well. So we are left with the usual non sequitur: we all want the cat belled, but no one wishes to bell it himself.

The obvious Left-wing rumblings about a sloppy war should not deter readership because Obeidi’s story ultimately is intrinsically interesting and deserves more than the bland sensationalism of journalism that seems to characterize the narrative. Above all, this is an inside study in totalitarian dictatorship where everything revolves around secrecy and surveillance, reminding us that no one, either in the US or Iraq, will ever quite unravel exactly what Saddam was up to or who all his accomplices were. Obeidi impresses the point that Iraqis did not say anything even at home among family members for fear of listening devices. He could not discuss what he did with anyone but his superior. So, we can assume he was as unaware of what other arms of the Baathist government were doing as they were of his own work. In short, The Bomb In My Garden is an exposition of one man’s effort to pursue science and avoid Saddam’s prisons. Under the shroud of totalitarian normalcy, the murderous dictator, the terrified scientist and foreign capitalists all collude to make nuclear weapons possible.

The book is also clear that nuclear weapons require expensive and complicated systems, and thus ultimately programs must be state-sponsored. In the case of Iraq, oil wealth and a dictator’s ambitions made resources available for development of nuclear weapons. In India and Pakistan equally, nuclear armament was made possible only by the resources of state. Their programs have been much censured because, with a rising tide of poverty plaguing their populations, such fiscal expenditures seem poorly allotted and funds obviously misdirected. Both countries are subject to international scrutiny, are checked by the deterrence of the other, and so far have shown a modicum of restraint in not using the weapons at their disposal.

In contrast, any potential threat of nuclear attack then would have to be from a rogue state that cares little for public odium and has no immediate nuclear rival. With Iraq’s program now squashed, we have to fear an Iran with enriched uranium, an assassinated Musharraf replaced by an unstable dictator or Islamicist mullah, or an unbalanced and erratic Kim Jung-Il. India seems less likely to resort to nuclear attack as it citizenry is increasingly prosperous and democratized, and a newly capitalist China also less a threat as its economy expands to join the industrialized world.

What then does the book show about Iraqi WMDs? The IAEA basically dismantled the Iraqi nuclear program before 1998: almost all plants were dismantled and procurements destroyed. Like the Duelfer Report, Obeidi concludes that there wasn’t much left of a nuclear program by the invasion of 2003 and that Saddam’s refusal to respond to UN demands must surely have been delusional, “like a weary boxer in the twelfth round waiting for the knockout blow.” The entire program, as far as Obeidi knew, was put on hold; the centrifuge cookbook was buried in his backyard. WMD threats, then, were properly more a biological or chemical, than a nuclear, worry.

Obeidi and Pitzer will satisfy neither Bushites nor Bush haters in the conundrum over the search for WMDs. While their account chronicles the fate of nuclear technology in Iraq, Obeidi obviously has little knowledge of the extent of Saddam’s complete weapons program, veiled as it was in secrecy, surveillance and fear. But he does end with a warning of sorts: “hundreds of nuclear scientists with expertise needed to enrich uranium and build bombs remain in Baghdad.” What exactly do these scientist know about WMDs whether nuclear, biological or chemical warheads, and what will be the source of their future employment?

If the book is mostly WMD hype and anti-climatic, there is still a few interesting sidenotes about the war against Saddam: What was it like for Iraqi officials in the first days of the 2003 invasion? How did the fate of the doomed Hussein Kamal affect the future of the WMD program? And how could a supposedly intrusive police-state become "a regime (that) preferred to close its eyes to the threat in the hope that it would just go away.”

In short, there was no nuclear bomb in the garden, or, in fact, in Iraq. However, Iraqi plans and scientists may be still waiting for the right time for a new nuclear, chemical or biological project to take root under a successor to Saddam; perhaps we will see in postwar Iraq democracy first, the best antidote to nuclear roguery yet.