A very tall tale (16 September 2002)
Published in Labour Left Briefing, October 2002.

Glen Rangwala uncovers the flaws in so-called expert evidence about Saddam’s nuclear capability.

Amid mounting internal and international opposition to US and UK plans for war in the Gulf, the British government is trumpeting a report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) entitled "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction: a net assessment". The report's release on 9th September provided the government with the opportunity to restore the debate to the narrow question of whether or not Iraq has any remaining material for the construction of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. This allowed it to escape the wider discussion on the devastating impact of an invasion on the entire Middle East, the basic fabric of international law, and the prospects for the continuance of life inside a country impoverished by 12 years of economic sanctions.

The headlines that accompanied the release of the 78-page IISS report were suitably alarmist for the government’s purposes. The Times headlined, "Saddam could soon build nuclear weapons, report says". The director of the IISS, John Chipman, played up this impression at the report’s launch, as he mixed attempted legal justifications for a war on Iraq, political commentary on the nature of the Iraqi regime, and comments on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that are not borne out in the report itself.

The IISS report won much of its credibility through the claim that it was an independent assessment of a politically charged issue. But how independent? The report was edited by Gary Samore, who served as the senior non-proliferation director on President Clinton's National Security Council. He is currently on leave from the US State Department, to which he will return on completion of his work at the IISS.

John Chipman, the Institute's director, is a former Nato fellow. A month before the release of the report, he penned an article in the Financial Times, "America's Right to Fight Iraq". This piece offered an entirely spurious legal argument that the UN Security Council resolution from 1990 that permitted countries to use force against Iraq was still in force today, seemingly forgetting that this resolution only granted the right to use force to oust Iraq from Kuwait - a task completed over eleven years ago.

According to The Independent, the Foreign Office contributed £100,000 to the setting up of the IISS's new headquarters, Arundel House, in central London. A further £1m was given by the Hollinger Group, which owns the Telegraph newspapers, the company of the notoriously pro-Israeli Conrad Black.

The claims in the report itself stand in contrast to the headlines it provoked. Far from portraying Iraq as being only months away from having a uranium bomb, this outcome was conditional upon Iraq managing to acquire fissile material - highly enriched uranium - from abroad. Obtaining the fissile material is the most difficult part of constructing any nuclear device, and there are no signs that Iraq has attempted to smuggle any such material into the country.

Clearly, Iraq could produce a simple uranium bomb if it managed to obtain the bomb's core components: so could almost any other industrialised country in the world. As Manhattan Project physicist Luis Alvarez wrote in 1987, "With modern weapons-grade uranium even a high school kid could make a bomb in short order." Short of stopping any students of physics from entering Iraq, the best control on the circulation of fissile material would be to invest resources into safeguarding Russia's nuclear material and to complete a fissile-material cut-off treaty, as agreed by the UN General Assembly in 1993. As methods of preventing the proliferation and use of nuclear material, these activities are likely to be considerably more effective than launching an invasion of a country which has shown no sign since 1991 of attempting to develop nuclear weapons.

The re-emergence of claims about Iraq's nuclear programme in the face of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary indicates more about the political agenda of those making the allegations than it does about Iraq's nuclear capabilities. To justify a massive invasion, a very tall tale is needed. The IISS has fitted into its role as a story-teller with considerable political acumen.