As chief of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, Khidhir Hamza saw the extravagance and excesses of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Hamza drove luxury autos, ate lavish meals in one of Saddam’s presidential palaces and commanded a virtual army of 1,000 scientists and technicians. He also watched as Saddam terrified the researchers struggling to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, ‘talking like a thug’ whenever he visited their labs. ‘You don’t argue with Saddam,’ Hamza recalled. ‘If you say 'no,’ you are dead. If you say 'yes’ and you don’t do it, then you are okay.’ Following the defeat of Iraq’s army in Kuwait by a U.S.-led coalition in 1991, United Nations inspectors fanned out across the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, hunting for weapons of mass destruction. Saddam ordered the scientists of the Iraqi Atomic Energy agency’s Fourth Group to move to an innocuous location in a technical training center. There, they pretended to study helicopter blueprints. The Fourth Group worked on Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. It played a cat-and-mouse game with U.N. inspectors to hide the extent of Iraq’s weapons development before the Gulf War and its continuing research after the war. The weapons program, like the country’s political system and elite social life, became totally corrupt, Hamza said. ‘It is evil in every way and personally oriented to Saddam and his family.’ Hamza describes the program and his own efforts in detail, relating the fine points of fusion as offhandedly as a cook sharing a kitchen recipe. He contends that the basic technology for an Iraqi nuclear weapon exists. All that remains to be acquired or built, he says, is the bomb’s core – made either of plutonium or uranium. Uranium is easier to work with, he said, because it is less toxic and radioactive. ‘Uranium can be used in gun-types of bombs … uranium is the main possibility for Iraq.’ Iraq has the computers, labs and technical expertise to develop doomsday weapons, he said. Most of the scientists working in the program are reluctant to try to escape as he did, for fear of being caught or leaving their families behind to Saddam’s vicious retaliation. ‘There were very few defections in the nuclear weapons program,’ he said. ‘Without the CIA getting my family out, they would have been murdered.’ Betsy Hiel is a Cairo-based correspondent for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. She can be reached by e-mail at hielb@yahoo.com .

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