Iraq Deja Vu All Over Again

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Once again, the United Nations Security Council has given Saddam Hussein a move-or-else deadline. Once again, George Bush has been lining up international support for military action and won pledges from Britain and France to join a bombing campaign.

So is it deja vu all over again? Perhaps not: this time the deadline and the threats seem to be working. Saddam ignored the ultimatum to get out of Kuwait by Jan. 15, but he appears to be obeying the new demand to disclose by this Thursday, once and for all, how much of his nuclear bomb-making program remains and where the machinery and material are hidden. After carrying on a shell game with U.N. inspectors for months, the Iraqis last week suddenly began deluging them with information. They even dug up and displayed devices called calutrons that had been buried in the desert and led the U.N. team through a once secret uranium-enrichment plant in the northern Iraqi village of Al Sharqat.

Moreover, what the inspectors have found has eased fears that Iraq is close to developing a deliverable A-bomb. Saddam had two uranium-enrichment programs going that the U.S. and its allies never suspected, as well as a third that they did know about, and his success in hiding them points to a frightening intelligence failure. But U.N. inspectors believe that even in January all were pilot programs; large-scale production had not begun.

As it turns out, allied bombers destroyed much of the secret uranium- enrichment machinery -- without quite realizing what they were doing. A production facility at Tarmiya was bombed partly because of suspicions that it also had some kind of connection with hush-hush research, but only in the past few weeks have U.N. inspectors discovered that the bombs wrecked calutrons , that nobody had known were there. The U.N. team now thinks Iraq may have produced secretly no more than the 1 lb. of slightly enriched uranium that it has finally confessed to having.

Iraq has, in addition, 98 lbs. of weapons-grade uranium, produced before Israel destroyed Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981, but the existence of that uranium has long since been disclosed to the International Atomic Energy Agency and it is inspected regularly to determine that it is not being diverted into a weapons program. Since Baghdad is bound by the cease-fire resolution to let the U.N. destroy all the enrichment machinery that has since been discovered, it cannot make much more soon. A State Department official agrees that Saddam's bomb-building program "is dead in the water."

So it seems increasingly unlikely that the bombers will attack Iraq again after the current deadline expires Thursday. But there will be trouble of other kinds. Saddam being Saddam, he can be expected to try to resume a secret bomb-building program as long as the faintest chance remains that he can get away with it. Given the failure of allied intelligence to learn about his calutrons and other dodges, how can the U.S. and friends be sure even now that he does not have some other nuclear machinery hidden someplace? The only way to be certain, say British officials, would be to search literally every sizable building and cave in Iraq, and even then who would know what might be buried under the desert sand? Moreover, Iraq has not yet reported stocks of chemical weapons and missiles that the U.S. and Britain are sure it has and that are also supposed to be disclosed by the Thursday deadline and then destroyed. Nor has Iraq revealed anything about its previously active biological weapons program.

The outlook thus is for a long, exasperating struggle in which Saddam keeps playing cat and mouse and discloses only as much about his various secret programs as he must, at the last second, to avoid a new attack. The U.S. and allied strategy will be to keep pressing for ever-more-intrusive U.N. inspection and policing. Further, Washington and its friends realize they must not merely continue to threaten more bombing as a punishment for any further cease-fire violations, they must mean it. Plans already drawn, and leaked quietly to make sure Saddam gets the message, indicate they are serious. According to British officials, U.S. planes from Saudi Arabia, Turkey and three aircraft carriers in the region, supplemented by British fighter-bombers flying from Cyprus, would blast about 25 targets with laser-guided bombs and missiles; ships might fire cruise missiles as well. They would hit not only all known and suspected nuclear sites (British officials say some suspected sites were not struck during the gulf war and view this as a big mistake) but also command-and-control centers, airfields and antiaircraft installations.

Meanwhile, U.S. and allied intelligence services must try to explain and rectify a potentially disastrous failure. Even after the war, and after the U.N. inspectors had arrived in Iraq, the full dimensions of Saddam's bomb- building program were still unknown. They were discovered only by a stroke of luck: an Iraqi engineer defected to the West and disclosed what his colleagues had been up to.

Until then, it seems, Western intelligence services had made the mistake of assuming that Iraqis thought the way they themselves did. In any hunk of uranium dug out of the earth less than 1% will be the readily fissionable isotope, U-235; that must be upgraded to at least 80% in bomb material. Western scientists long ago settled on high-speed gas centrifuges to do the enrichment. Intelligence services looked for centrifuges in countries that they suspected of trying to make nuclear weapons and found some in Iraq.

But Saddam's scientists also tried a chemical-separation process and the calutrons. The U.S. had employed calutrons to enrich uranium used in the Hiroshima bomb, but then abandoned the technology because it is very expensive and produces enriched uranium only slowly and in small quantities. For Saddam, however, calutrons had advantages. The technology had been declassified and was discussed freely in scientific journals. The imported components had legitimate industrial uses and did not raise eyebrows in the West; better yet, Iraqi industry could produce most of the necessary components itself. Calutrons gulp enormous amounts of electricity, and the power lines to supply it should have been visible in satellite photographs. But since nobody in the West dreamed that Saddam would resurrect calutron technology, the interpreters of satellite pictures, if they saw such evidence, failed to understand what they were looking at.

All of which raise a scary question: Might some other country even now be hiding a nuclear-weapons program? U.S. officials do not worry too much about more countries using calutrons. They are so expensive and relatively ! inefficient as to be attractive only to a dictator like Saddam, desperate to get his hands on a bomb at any cost. Nonetheless, says a senior British diplomat, "what we must do now is provide controls for every conceivable method of making nukes." At minimum, there must be a far more extensive and intrusive inspection process than the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (which Iraq signed) now provides. Saddam wannabes may be rare, but one would be more than enough.

With reporting by William Mader/London and J.F.O. McAllister/ Washing ton