The Twilight of the Bombs

by Richard Rhodes

  The situation was more urgent4 now that the test ban treaty [i.e., the CTBT] was nearing completion. The scientists feared that it would be effected whether India signed it or not and that the weight of the international community would then lean so hard on India that no government would authorize nuclear tests. They had high confidence in their designs for fission weapons that could be fitted on the Prithvi [missile] or still more easily on the [larger] Agni. But what they really wanted was the opportunity to demonstrate to the nation and the world their great leap forward to thermonuclear capability and to conduct other explosive experiments that would provide data for long-term computer-aided design activities in case no further tests were to be allowed. They also wanted to test their capacity to use non-weapon-grade plutonium in weapons, a capacity that would significantly increase India’s potential stockpile.

  A round of nuclear-weapons tests in the midst of the CTBT negotiations that summer might have compromised those negotiations; it would certainly have brought down international condemnation on India. The Vajpayee government lost a vote of confidence on 28 May, however, and the new coalition prime minister, concerned about the economic consequences of sanctions, postponed the test round indefinitely. Immensely frustrated, the Indian defense establishment pulled the one loaded test device from its borehole, disarmed the other devices it had prepared to test, and impatiently bided its time until the BJP could build a majority and return to power.

  HUSSEIN KAMEL’S AUGUST 1995 defection led Iraq to revert to a policy of cooperation with UNSCOM inspectors after having announced only weeks previously that it would cease cooperating entirely. Rolf Ekéus told an audience later that the defection had “profoundly shocked the Iraqi5 leadership, and UNSCOM benefited from significant Iraqi cooperation for several months; Iraq even surrendered important documents and explanations of Iraq’s weapons-development strategies.”

  To explain their sudden turnabout, the Iraqis blamed Saddam’s errant son-in-law; Hussein Kamel’s deputy Amer Rashid, who remained loyal to Saddam, wrote Ekéus in New York in mid-August that Kamel “had been responsible6 for hiding important information on Iraq’s prohibited programs” and asked the UNSCOM chairman to return to Baghdad. After revealing discussions there which Ekéus complained were devoid of documentation, he was directed to the defector’s chicken farm, on the road between Baghdad and the international airport, where he was advised he would find “items of great interest.” As the journalists Andrew and Patrick Cockburn paraphrased him, “In a locked chicken shed,7 Ekéus found piles of metal and wooden boxes packed with over half a million documents as well as microfiches, computer disks and photographs. Almost all of this treasure trove carried an abundance of detail about the secret weapons programs, particularly the nuclear weapons effort.”

  Kamel repatriated to Iraq with most of his relatives in February 1997, lured improbably by Saddam Hussein’s promises of forgiveness. “Do you think I could harm8 the father of my grandchildren?” Saddam had asked him ingenuously during one of their telephone negotiations. The world had not welcomed Saddam’s son-in-law, except for intelligence debriefings, nor had the United States been willing to implement his plan to overthrow the dictator—in a CIA agent’s contemptuous summary, “He would return to Baghdad9 behind the U.S. Army and Air Force. End of subject.” At his sister’s villa in Baghdad within days of his return, members of his clan loyal to Saddam sent in a carload of submachine guns to allow him to defend himself, then killed him in an extended gun battle.

  Ekéus understood from Kamel’s revelations that UNSCOM had been systematically deceived. He decided to switch his organization’s efforts from inspections designed to ferret out WMD programs and facilities to inspections designed to unravel the Iraqi concealment system. “UNSCOM would be spying10 on Iraq,” wrote its deputy chairman, Charles Duelfer, a trim, astute American brevetted to the U.N. commission from the CIA. “We would be using virtually every technical collection technique sophisticated countries used to obtain information about their opponents. The only area we ruled out was directly recruiting agents. The goal was to either peel back the layers of untruth ourselves or simply cause Iraq to decide to be completely forthcoming.” The new strategy coupled surprise inspections, sometimes after hours, with monitoring of Iraq radio and phone transmissions and realtime overhead imaging via U-2 spy plane. “Since the U-2 could loiter11 over certain areas and flew very high,” Duelfer explained, “it could provide very broad coverage. If inspectors triggered an Iraqi reaction in an adjacent area, we could pick it up with the U-2 imagery.” The U-2, an old aircraft, had frequent mechanical problems, however, and the Iraqis could track it with their air-defense radar. Duelfer said he asked the CIA for a Predator UAV, “but in 1996–1997, there were only a couple, and those were committed to the Balkans. The U.S military also questioned their value. The Air Force hated them, because they had no pilots. For our purposes, a Predator would have been great. It would have allowed us to put aerial eyes on sites, with a very long loiter time. It was asking for too much, too soon.”

  In similar spirit, Dimitri Perricos organized what he called a “urinalysis of Iraq’s rivers,” a radiometric survey of samples of water from the Tigris and Euphrates conducted across ten days in April 1997. It showed “no indication of Iraq12 having carried out any proscribed nuclear activities,” he reported to the U.N. Security Council, but it confirmed the sensitivity of the technology by detecting real radioactive urine from medical tests carried into the rivers by the Iraqi sewage system. By October 1997, the IAEA was able to report that it had carried out more than a thousand inspections in Iraq, including 250 since the previous April, for which there was “no indication of prohibited materials.” That could mean that the Iraqis had dismantled their WMD programs, as they claimed, or it could simply mean that they had succeeded in hiding them. No one was prepared to take their word for it anymore, and they continued to withhold documents. Even the chicken-farm documents, one and a half million pages, had been purged. “There were no documents13 from the Ministry of Defense,” Duelfer noted. “Not one.… This fact, and the clear evidence that these documents had been systematically retained and concealed, forced us to conclude that there was a government-directed system to retain WMD materials, if not weapons themselves. And the documents provided no clear evidence that the system was terminated.” The missing documents and artifacts made Hussein Kamel’s claim—Iraq’s claim—that its WMD had been destroyed impossible to prove, Duelfer pointed out:

  The Iraqis had provided14 so many explanations over the years to explain their partial revelations that it became impossible for them to recreate a completely consistent and verifiable accounting of their WMD materials. Given the track record of past concealment and their reluctant admissions of key program elements, UNSCOM had no reason to give Iraq the benefit of the doubt. Moreover, we knew that Iraq’s account was wrong at particular points and those points were more logically explained by a decision by Iraq to retain weapons than by the explanations Iraq offered, which were akin to “the dog ate my homework.”

  The third-highest-ranking Iraqi WMD official, Duelfer says, Dr. Amer al-Saadi, told UNSCOM that it was asking Iraq to “verify the unverifiable15.… Nothing is left, it is obliterated.” Duelfer added, from a post–Gulf War perspective: “It emerged that this was, in fact, the case. In the end, we had asked Iraq to prove the nonexistence of something—a task wholly dependent on trustworthiness. The Iraqis did not have WMD. But neither could we ever trust them.” In that discrepancy lay the seeds of the second Gulf War.

  ROLF EKÉUS LEFT UNSCOM in the summer of 1997 to become Swedish ambassador to the United States. To replace him, the U.N. secretary-general, Kofi Annan, chose Richard Butler, at that time the Australian ambassador to the United Nations. “Head of UNSCOM16 was certainly an appropriate job for me,” Butler wrote. “Having spent years learning about weapons of mass destruction and crafting treaties and procedures for controlling and limiting them, I found it exciting to consider taking
on the challenge of physically eliminating them from one of the world’s most troubled and important regions.” Butler had questions about the job’s feasibility, but in the end he accepted the challenge.

  The Australian diplomat had been drawn to and involved with large issues of international peace and security, nuclear issues in particular, for most of his life. Born in 1942, the son of a landscape gardener, he grew up in Bondi, a working-class suburb of Sydney known worldwide for the quality of its surfing at Bondi Beach. Like most young people in the neighborhood, Butler body- and board-surfed his way through childhood. “I would sit on my surfboard out at the back of the waves at Bondi Beach,” he told me, “and see the planes going from Sydney Airport off to America and off to Europe and I used to look at those and think, ‘I’m going to be on one of those one day.’”

  Bondi was filled with recent immigrants. “Half of my schoolmates were refugees,” Butler wrote, “mostly Ashkenazi Jews, from Hitler’s Europe. In talking and playing with them, I was introduced to the world beyond Australia, a world I realized was filled with armed conflict, political problems, and real beastliness by humans against one another. I became very interested in those things.” High school brought further exposure to the world’s beastliness, “the arrival of refugee kids from the Soviet invasion of Hungary [which suppressed the Hungarian revolution of 1956]. This again increased my interest in international relations.” Butler majored in politics and economics at the University of Sydney, worked briefly for the Australian Atomic Energy Commission after his graduation in 1963, and the following year was one of fourteen candidates for the Australian diplomatic corps selected from among eight hundred who applied.

  Although the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when Butler was four years old had astonished and relieved Australia, which had faced Japanese invasion through much of the Pacific War, the Australian diplomat traces his interest in nuclear issues to his exposure to Jewish war refugees after 1945. He learned German as a result, read about the abortive German atomic-bomb program, and “really wanted to know more about where all this came from and where it was going to lead.”

  Another vivid experience that turned Butler toward nuclear issues was a 1965 visit to Australia by Alvin Weinberg, the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a prominent nuclear pioneer. Short, Jewish, and urban, Weinberg was an unlikely candidate for Butler’s program of entertainment: Besides leading him on a weeklong tour of Australia’s nuclear infrastructure, the junior officer took him bodysurfing at Bondi Beach.

  “He was amazed at how strong the waves were and how they battered a person,” Butler wrote. “I tried to teach him how to shoot a wave, how to catch one with his body. He was just fascinated by it all. He was also fascinated by the bikinis,* how natural it seemed to be for young women there to be wearing almost nothing and no one paid any attention. He found that quite extraordinary.”

  As a young diplomat, Butler was posted to the IAEA in Vienna from 1966 to 1969. He wrote a master’s thesis during his time in Vienna on the IAEA safeguards system. “It was probably the most intensely productive period of my life, burning the candle at both ends, putting in fifteen-hour days and then coming home at ten o’clock at night and working on my thesis.” Canberra summoned him home in 1969 and assigned him to the Africa–Middle East section to season him to bureaucratic routine, to which he has never taken kindly.

  That year the Australian national security establishment was facing the fact that the NPT, opened for signature in 1968, would foreclose Australian access to British nuclear-weapons technology, which it had been maneuvering for a decade to acquire. To convince Australia to sign the treaty, the United States had to send over Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who reassured the Australian cabinet that the United States was willing to support Australian work on so-called peaceful nuclear explosives as well as a bomb program “to a point just short of final manufacture.”

  Australia finally did sign the NPT in 1970, reluctantly and with fine-print reservations. For Australian hawks, the only evident alternative to British collaboration was an indigenous program. To that end, the Conservative Party proposed building a natural-uranium-fueled nuclear-power reactor south of Sydney at Jervis Bay, a proposal enthusiastically endorsed by the Australian AEC chairman Sir Philip Baxter, a chemical engineer and nuclear-weapons enthusiast. Butler thought the proposal nonsensical. “Australia has more coal than most people have hot dinners,” he told me. “Australia is rich in coal. It also has the world’s largest stock of uranium, but even today a major export is low-sulfur, high-energy coal. We’re one of the last countries in the world that needs to generate electricity by nuclear means.”

  The covert purpose of the proposal was to breed plutonium for weapons. Baxter, said Butler, had even begun saying in public “that Australia’s security was threatened by Indonesia and others and that we needed to have a nuclear deterrent.” Outraged at the idea of his country abandoning the NPT to become a renegade nuclear power, Butler barged in to complain to his superior, the deputy secretary of state. “He listened to me and said that he admired my passion and zeal and all that sort of thing but that I was way out of line. It would be best if I went back to the Africa–Middle East section and kept my nose out of these things.”

  Instead, Butler arranged to write an article on the subject for The Bulletin, the Australian equivalent of Time magazine. “In that article I compared Sir Philip Baxter to Dr. Strangelove and said that he was lying to the government and lying to the people. Jervis Bay was not about producing electricity, it was an attempt to bring Australia into nuclear-weapons status and it should be seen for what it was and utterly rejected.” The reactor project and the implicit bomb program were cancelled in 1971, when the government changed. By then, Butler had found a mentor in the Australian ambassador to the United Nations and had moved to New York to work as one of eight diplomats managing the Australian mission.

  In 1976 the Labor Party enlisted Butler to manage its national election campaign. “Australian elections are a blood sport played with take-no-prisoners intensity,” he wrote. “In 1977, we hit the road, and for several weeks the polls looked promising. But our hopes were dashed in the last two weeks of the campaign. We lost.” Labor had better luck in 1983, when Bob Hawke was elected prime minister and appointed his Labor Party predecessor, Bill Hayden, as foreign minister. Butler was then representing Australia at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. Visiting Paris for a ministerial meeting, Hayden used the occasion to sound out Butler about the nuclear unease then abroad in the world:

  He and I were walking together by the River Seine when he said to me, “Richard, I’m deeply concerned about the standstill in progress on nuclear disarmament that we’ve had since Reagan became president.” Remember the atmosphere in those days. Reagan wouldn’t even speak to the Russians during 1981 and 1982; he was talking about the “evil empire” and vowing an arms buildup against their perceived threat. As a result, the world was as worried about nuclear war as it had ever been; the film The Day After was released, scientist Carl Sagan and others were writing and speaking about “nuclear winter,” and so on.

  Hayden said, “Richard, you’re an expert on nuclear matters. What can we Australians do about it?” I said, speaking largely theoretically, that if we wanted to make an impact we would have to devote new and specific resources to the task. Hayden subsequently came up with the idea of creating an entirely new diplomatic position, called Australian Ambassador for Disarmament, with a cabinet-level mandate to do whatever he could to move the world toward disarmament.

  When Hayden announced the new position that June, he also announced that Butler would receive the appointment.

  Since then the ambassador for disarmament had worked in many venues to reduce and limit the world’s nuclear arsenals. Finishing the job of disarming Iraq, as he hoped to do, would add hands-on experience to his portfolio. “I’ve spent a lifetime17 talking about disarmament,” he told Kofi Annan wh
en he accepted the assignment—“passing resolutions, extending treaties, and so on. Now I’ll be able to roll up my sleeves, get my hands on some weapons, and do some actual, physical disarmament. Everything I’ve argued for in the past compels me to do this real job.” He would do it because Annan had asked him, he added, and because Ekéus had said he would have “real flexibility of operations.”

  He soon learned otherwise. “Butler came in at an extremely18 difficult time,” Duelfer commented. “The Security Council was fracturing, and Iraq was losing patience.… The Iraqis set out to take advantage of him, if at all possible.” Tariq Aziz plied Butler with Cuban cigars at their first meeting in Baghdad, and when Duelfer thought Butler seemed receptive, the American said, he wrote the new chairman a cautionary memo warning him that the Iraqis “would quickly take advantage19 of any perceived softness or weakness. ‘You have to grab them by the throat,’” Duelfer quoted himself, “‘and feel the pulse of the carotid artery under your thumb. Apply pressure and don’t let go.’” Whatever Butler thought of that vivid advice, Duelfer said he “quickly came to his own harsh assessment of the regime.… It did not take him long to become very antagonistic. In turn, the Iraqis treated him with disdain, painted him as under the control of Washington, and tried to undermine him in the Security Council via [their allies] the Russians and the French.”

  In September 1997 Butler organized a mass inspection designed, Duelfer wrote, “to flood Iraq20 with a large number of inspection teams, aiming to overwhelm Iraq’s ability to monitor and control them all. We succeeded. There were several blockages and confrontations, which produced clear evidence of Iraqi deception activities—though again, we could not tell exactly what they were concealing.” Iraq struck back at the beginning of November by refusing to allow American inspectors to enter the country. Butler countered by pulling all his inspectors, whatever their nationality, and referring the Iraqi challenge to the Security Council. The Council supported him, but Kofi Annan questioned him sharply about why he needed American inspectors and sent three U.N. diplomats to Baghdad to negotiate a compromise.