The Fist of God (27 page)

“Well, gentlemen, the good news is that our friend Mr. Saddam Hussein does not have, an atomic bomb at his disposal. Not yet, not by a long chalk,” said Dr. Hipwell, as he disappeared into a cloud of pale blue smoke.

There was a pause while he attended to his personal bonfire. Perhaps, Terry Martin mused, if you risk collecting a lethal dose of plutonium rays every day, the occasional pipe of tobacco does not really matter.

Dr. Hipwell glanced at his notes.

“Iraq has been on the trail of her own nuclear bomb since the mid-1970s, when Saddam Hussein really came to power. It seems to be the man’s obsession. In those years Iraq bought a complete nuclear reactor system from France—which was not bound by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1968—for that very purpose.”

He sucked contentedly and tamped the glowing brushfire at the top of his pipe once again. Drifting embers settled onto his notes.

“Forgive me,” said Sir Paul. “Was this reactor for the purpose of generating electricity?”

“Supposed to be,” agreed Hipwell. “Absolute rubbish, of course, and the French knew it. Iraq has the third-largest oil deposits in the world.

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They could have had an oil-fired power station for a fraction of the price. No, the point was to fuel the reactor with low-grade uranium, called yellowcake or caramel, that they could persuade people to sell them. After use in a reactor, the end-product is plutonium.”

There were nods around the table. Everyone knew that the British reactor at Sellafield created electricity for the power grid and spewed out the plutonium that went to Hipwell for his warheads.

“So the Israelis went to work,” said Hipwell. “First one of their commando teams blew up the huge turbine at Toulon before it was shipped, setting the project back two years. Then in 1981, when Saddam’s precious Osirak 1 and 2 plants were about to start up, Israeli fighter-bombers swept in and blew the lot to kingdom come. Since then, Saddam has never succeeded in buying another reactor. After a short while, he stopped trying.”

“Why the hell did he do that?” asked Harry Sinclair from his end of the table.

“Because he changed direction,” said Hipwell with a broad smile, like one who has solved a crossword puzzle in record time. “Up until then, he was pursuing the plutonium road. With some success, by the way.

But not enough. Yet—”

“I don’t understand,” said Sir Paul Spruce. “What is the difference between a plutonium-based and a uranium-based atomic bomb?”

“Uranium is simpler,” said the physicist. “Look, there are various radioactive substances that can be used for a chain reaction, but for your simple, basic, effective atom bomb, uranium’s the ticket. That’s what Saddam has been after since 1982—a basic uranium-based bomb.

He hasn’t got there yet, but he’s still trying, and he’ll get there one day.”

Hipwell sat back with a broad beam, as if he had settled the enigma of The Fist of God

the Creation. Like most of those around the table, Spruce was still perplexed.

“If he can buy this uranium for his destroyed reactor, why can’t he make a bomb with it?” he asked.

Hipwell pounced upon the question like a farmer on a bargain.

“Different kinds of uranium, my dear man. Funny stuff, uranium. Very rare. From a thousand tons of uranium ore, all you get is a block the size of a cigar box. Yellowcake. It’s called natural uranium, with an isotope number of 238. You can power an industrial reactor with it, but not make a bomb. Not pure enough. For a bomb you need the lighter isotope, uranium-235.”

“Where does that come from?” asked Paxman.

“It’s inside the yellowcake. In that one cigar-box-size block there is enough uranium-235 to stick under one fingernail without discomfort.

The devil is getting the two separated. It’s called isotope separation.

Very difficult, very technical, very expensive, and very slow.”

“But you said Iraq is getting there,” pointed out Sinclair.

“He is, but he’s not there yet,” said Hipwell. “There’s only one viable way of purifying and refining the yellowcake to the required ninety-three percent pure. Years ago, in the Manhattan Project, your chaps tried several methods. They were experimenting, see? Ernest Lawrence tried one way, Robert Oppenheimer tried another. In those days they used both methods in complementary fashion and created enough uranium-235 to make Little Boy.

“After the war the centrifuge method was invented and slowly perfected. Nowadays only this method is used. Basically, you put the feedstock into a thing called a centrifuge, which spins so fast that the whole process has to be done in a vacuum or the bearings would turn to jelly. Slowly the heavier isotopes, the ones you don’t want, are The Fist of God

drawn to the outer wall of the centrifuge and bled off. What’s left is a little bit purer than when you started. Just a little bit. You have to do it over and over again, thousands of hours, just to get a wafer of bomb-grade uranium the size of a postage stamp.”

“But he is doing it?” pressed Sir Paul.

“Yep. Been doing it for about a year. These centrifuges ... to save time we link them in series, called cascades. But you need thousands of centrifuges to make up a cascade.”

“If they’ve been going down that road since 1982, why has it taken so long?” asked Terry Martin.

“You don’t go into the hardware store and buy a uranium gas diffusion centrifuge off the shelf,” Hipwell pointed out. “They tried at first but were turned down—the documents show that. Since 1985 they have been buying the component parts to build their own on-site. They got about five hundred tons of basic uranium yellowcake, half of it from Portugal. They bought much of the centrifuge technology from West Germany—”

“I thought Germany had signed a whole range of international agreements limiting the spread of nuclear bomb technology,” protested Paxman.

“Maybe they have. I wouldn’t know about the politics,” said the scientist. “But they got the bits and pieces from all over the place. You need designer lathes, special ultrastrong maraging steel, anticorrosion vessels, special valves, high-temperature furnaces called ‘skull’

furnaces because that’s what they look like, plus vacuum pumps and bellows—this is serious technology we are talking about. Quite a bit, plus the know-how, came from Germany.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Sinclair. “Has Saddam got any isotope separation centrifuges working yet?”

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“Yes, one cascade. It’s been functioning for about a year. And another one is coming on stream soon.”

“Do you know where all this stuff is?”

“The centrifuge assembly plant is at a place called Taji—here.” The scientist passed a large aerial photo over to the American and circled a series of industrial buildings.

“The working cascade seems to be underground somewhere not far from the old wrecked French reactor at Tuwaitha, the reactor they called Osirak. I don’t know whether you’ll ever find it with a bomber—it’s certainly underground and camouflaged.”

“And the new cascade?”

“No idea,” said Hipwell. “Could be anywhere.”

“Probably somewhere else,” suggested Terry Martin. “The Iraqis have been practicing duplication and dispersal ever since they put all their eggs in one basket and the Israelis blew the basket away.”

Sinclair grunted.

“How sure are you,” asked Sir Paul, “that Saddam Hussein cannot have his bomb yet?”

“Very,” said the physicist. “It’s a question of time. He hasn’t had long enough. For a basic but usable atomic bomb, he will need thirty to thirty-five kilograms of pure uranium-235. Starting cold a year ago, even assuming the working cascade can function twenty-four hours a day—which it can’t—a spinning program needs at least twelve hours per centrifuge. You need a thousand spins to get from zero percent pure to the required ninety-three percent. That’s five hundred days of spinning. But then there’s cleaning, servicing, maintenance, breakdowns. Even with a thousand centrifuges operating in a cascade now and for the past year, you’d need five years. Bring in another cascade next year—shorten it to three years.”

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“So he won’t have his thirty-five kilograms until 1993 at the earliest?”

interjected Sinclair.

“No, he can’t.”

“One final question: If he gets the uranium, how much longer to an atomic bomb?”

“Not long. A few weeks. You see, a country undertaking to make its own bomb will have the nuclear engineering side running in parallel.

Bomb engineering is not all that complicated, so long as you know what you are doing. And Jaafar does—he will know how to build one and trigger it. Dammit, we trained him at Harwell. But the point is, on a time-scale alone, Saddam Hussein cannot have enough pure uranium ready yet. Ten kilograms, tops. He’s three years short, minimum.”

Dr. Hipwell was thanked for his weeks of analysis, and the meeting ended.

Sinclair would return to his embassy and write up his copious notes, which would go to the United States in heavy code. There they would be compared with the analyses of the American counterparts—physicists drawn from the laboratories of Sandia, Los Alamos, and principally Lawrence Livermore in California, where for years a secret section called simply Department Z had been monitoring the steady spread of nuclear technology around the world on behalf of the State Department and the Pentagon.

Though Sinclair could not know it, the findings of the British and American teams would confirm each other to a remarkable degree.

Terry Martin and Simon Paxman left the same meeting and wandered across Whitehall in the benign October sunshine.

“Quite a relief,” said Paxman. “Old Hipwell was quite adamant.

Apparently the Americans agree entirely. That bastard is nowhere near his atom bomb yet. One less nightmare to worry about.”

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They parted at the corner, Paxman to cross the Thames toward Century House, Martin to cross Trafalgar Square and head up St. Martin’s Lane toward Gower Street.

Establishing what Iraq had, or even probably had, was one thing.

Finding out precisely where it was situated was another. The photography went on and on. The KH-11s and KH-12s drifted across the heavens in endless sequence, photographing what they saw on the Iraqi land beneath them.

By October, another device had entered the skies, a new American reconnaissance plane so secret that Capitol Hill did not know about it.

Code-named Aurora, it flew on the fringes of inner space, reaching speeds of Mach 8, almost five thousand miles per hour, riding its own fireball—the ramjet effect—far beyond Iraqi radar or interceptor missiles. Not even the technology of the dying USSR could spot Aurora, which had replaced the legendary SR-71 Blackbird.

Ironically, while the Blackbird was being eased out of commission, another even more aged “old faithful” was plying its trade above Iraq that autumn. Almost forty years old, nicknamed the Dragon Lady, the U-2 was still flying and still taking pictures. It was back in 1960 that Gary Powers was shot down in a U-2 over Sverdlovsk, Siberia, and it was the U-2 that had spotted the first Soviet missiles being deployed in Cuba in the summer of 1962, even though it was Oleg Penkovsky who had identified them as offensive and not defensive weapons, thus blowing away Khrushchev’s phony protests and sowing the seeds of his own eventual destruction.

The U-2 of 1990 had been reequipped as a “listener” rather than a

“watcher” and redesignated TR-1, though it still did photography.

All this information, from the professors and scientists, analysts and interpreters, the trackers and the watchers, the interviewers and The Fist of God

researchers, built up a picture of Iraq through the autumn of 1990, and a frightening picture it became.

From a thousand sources the information finally was channeled into a single and very secret room two floors below the Saudi Air Force headquarters on Old Airport Road. The room, down the street from where the military brass sat in conference and discussed their unauthorized (by the United Nations) plans for the invasion of Iraq, was called simply “the Black Hole.”

It was in the Black Hole that American and British targeters, drawn from all three services and of all ranks from private to general, pinpointed the sites that would have to be destroyed. Finally, they would make up General Chuck Horner’s air-war map. It contained eventually seven hundred targets. Six hundred were military—in the sense of being command centers, bridges, airfields, arsenals, ammunition dumps, missile sites, and troop concentrations. The other hundred were targets concerned with weapons of mass destruction—research facilities, assembly plants, chemical labs, storage depots.

The gas centrifuge manufacturing line at Taji was listed, as was the approximate, assumed, position of the centrifuge cascade underground somewhere in the Tuwaitha complex.

But the water-bottling plant at Tarmiya was not there, nor was Al Qubai. No one knew about them.

A copy of the comprehensive report by Harry Sinclair in London joined other reports emanating from various parts of the United States and abroad. Finally, a synthesis of all these in-depth analyses found its way to a very small and very discreet State Department think tank, known only to a restricted group in Washington as the Political Intelligence and Analysis Group. The PIAG is a sort of analytical The Fist of God

hothouse for foreign affairs and produces reports that are absolutely not for public consumption. Indeed, the unit answers only to the Secretary of State, at that time James Baker.

Two days later, Mike Martin lay flat on a roof that gave him a commanding view of the section of Abrak Kheitan where he had set up his rendezvous with Abu Fouad.

At almost exactly the appointed hour, he watched a single car leave the King Faisal Highway leading to the airport and pull into a side street.

The car cruised slowly down the street, away from the bright lights of the highway and the occasional traffic, and into darkness.

He saw the outline stop at the place he had described in his message to Al-Khalifa. Two people got out, a man and a woman. They looked around, checked that no other car had followed them off the highway, and slowly walked on, toward the place where a grove of trees covered a vacant lot.