WASHINGTON/BAGHDAD, 12 December 2002 — UN arms experts searched an Iraqi factory making missile and tank parts yesterday after Washington threatened possible nuclear retaliation if its forces or its allies were attacked with doomsday weapons.
Raising the stakes in its confrontation with Iraq, the United States said in a strategy document that it could go nuclear if banned weapons were used against its forces or its allies.
It said the United States “reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force — including through resort to all our options — to the use of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) against the United States, our forces abroad, and friends and allies”.
US officials said the passage on nuclear deterrence was not a change in policy but had been added to the document, the first update since 1993, to put more emphasis on the role of deterrence against a weapons of mass destruction attack.
In Iraq, UN weapons inspection teams picked up the pace in the third week of a hunt for alleged arsenals of banned weapons of mass destruction.
The inspections have intensified since Iraq handed over an official declaration of its weapons programs on Saturday, as ordered by a UN Security Council resolution in November.
Inspectors, escorted by Iraqi officials, drove from their Baghdad headquarters to five suspect sites. One team went to a factory for missile and tank parts at Karamah complex in Taji, 10 km (six miles) north of Baghdad.
The factory was built in 1999, after UN inspectors were withdrawn from the country, but Iraq said nothing illegal was being done at the plant.
“The whole site is under monitoring but the factory itself was searched for the first time,” said Brig. Kamel Saeed, who oversees the factory. “It was on the declaration handed in by Iraq.”
The plant is part of a complex run by the Karamah Public Company, part of Iraq’s Military Industrialization Commission.
“We make precision parts for Al-Somoud missiles,” he said. The 18-meter rocket has a maximum range of 150 km (95 miles), which is permitted under the 1991 Gulf War cease-fire terms.
A previous facility at the site was bombed in late 1998, he said. The experts inspected machines previously tagged by arms teams at the destroyed facility.
“They checked and found everything is okay. There were no provocations but questions, and we answered them,” Saeed added.
Journalists, who toured the sprawling site after inspectors left, saw workers in blue and gray overalls using computerized lathes to make metal parts for missiles, tanks and other gear.
Saeed said UN inspectors watched the making of the parts, checked the computer programs used by the machines and asked for maps of the site and its buildings. On Dec. 2, weapons inspectors visited another Karamah complex in the Wazireyah industrial district of Baghdad.
UN experts checked four other locations: Ibn Sina nuclear site in Tarmiya, 30 km (20 miles) northwest of Baghdad; Tuweitha nuclear site, 20 km (12 miles) south of Baghdad; a biological site at Amriyah, 45 km (28 miles) to the southwest; and Fateh chemical site on the city’s outskirts.
Inspectors who had spent the night at a phosphate facility at Al-Qaem, 400 km (250 miles) northwest of Baghdad — said to have produced refined uranium ore — resumed work yesterday.
At the United Nations, chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said he hoped to have an assessment of the Iraqi declaration next week after distributing an edited version to the full 15-member Security Council.
The dossier, which is supposed to give a complete account of Iraq’s past and present weapons programs, was demanded by the Council as part of its tough Resolution 1441, requiring Iraq to disarm or face serious consequences. (Agencies)
