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Five months ago, an international team of specialists on weapons of
mass destruction began to gather on the 31st floor of the UN headquarters
in New York. Their job was to enforce UN resolution 687, passed on 3 April,
soon after Iraq accepted the terms of a cease-fire dictated by the allies.
The resolution called on the UN secretary-general to rid Iraq of all weapons
of mass destruction, including long-range missiles and nuclear, chemical
and biological weapons.

At the end of April, the office consisted of four officials on loan
from their governments, ‘two telephones that didn’t work and two secretaries’,
recalls Johan Molander, a Swedish diplomat who was there from the beginning.
Molander is an aide to Rolf Ekeus, a retired Swedish diplomat who is serving
as executive chairman of the UN’s Special Commission on disarming Iraq.
Since these modest beginnings, the office has conducted an unprecedented
campaign to locate and destroy Iraq’s most fearsome weapons.

The staff of the Special Commission has already sent 14 inspection teams
into Iraq. They have begun to demolish Iraq’s ballistic missiles and chemical
weapons. They have also taken over several nuclear facilities that Iraq
successfully hid from Western intelligence until after the war ended.

This campaign is the most ambitious attempt to eliminate a nation’s
military arsenal since the allied powers supervised the destruction of Japan’s
and Germany’s weapons at the end of the second World War. But its closest
historical parallel is the campaign to disarm Germany after the First World
War, because Iraq, like Germany, remains a sovereign nation that is being
forced to pay for its own disarmament.

The investigation of Iraq is haunted by ironies. Soviet officials can
provide authoritative details on Scud missiles, for instance, because the
Soviet Union built them. An official from the German Ministry of Defence
is now supervising their destruction, but a few years ago, engineers from
German companies were hard at work on the missiles, modifying them to extend
their range. Representatives from URENCO, a European industrial consortium
that enriches uranium fuel for power plants, were the best experts on Iraq’s
attempts to purify uranium-235 with centrifuges. Iraq’s centrifuges were
copied from an early design smuggled out of URENCO itself.

Many of the people now unearthing and destroying Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction make their livings by working on similar weapons at home. The
UN can boast few experts on chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, so
Molander and his colleagues turned for technical assistance to military
laboratories of leading industrial nations.

Specialists on building nuclear weapons flew in from laboratories at
Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore in the US, joined colleagues from Aldermaston
in Britain and similar establishments in France and the Soviet Union. Britain’s
Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment at Porton Down, in Wiltshire,
released David Kelly to lead a delegation investigating Iraq’s biological
weapons. Porton Down, like a similar US facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland,
no longer produces offensive biological weapons. But, to develop vaccines
and protective clothing, they keep some of the disease agents that Iraqi
scientists were producing, such as the bacteria that cause anthrax and botulism.

Specialists on chemical weapons came from places as diverse as the Swedish
defence research establishment at Umea, its French counterpart at Vert le
Petit, France, the US Army’s Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, and the Prins
Maurits Laboratory in Rijswijk, the Netherlands.

It wasn’t hard to find specialists on chemical weapons, says Molander,
who spent several years as a Swedish representative to the chemical weapons
talks in Geneva. ‘It’s the old boy’s network at work,’ he says. Years of
negotiations have created ‘an international chemical weapons community,
and we all know each other’. There is a similar community of people specialising
in biological and nuclear weapons.

Only when looking for specialists on ballistic missiles was the staff
of the UN Special Commission at a loss. There is no international community
that discusses controls on missiles, says Molander. As a result, the commission
simply asked several governments to nominate people. The US sent an army
officer whose last assignment was monitoring the destruction of SS-20 missiles
in the Soviet Union. The Germans sent someone who had been destroying Scud
missiles inherited by Germany when East and West were unified.

Such cooperation among the world’s military powers breaks important
ground, says Michael Krepon, a specialist on arms control verification at
the Stimson Center, a private research group in Washington. ‘The usual tight
walls surrounding national technical means of verification are being breached,’
he says. According to Krepon, this experience will be useful in verifying
a ban on chemical weapons now being negotiated in Geneva.

The UN’s nuclear inspectors had the hardest struggle, because Iraq fought
to conceal much of its nuclear programme. Iraqi officials refused to reveal
many of their nuclear sites until UN inspectors insisted on visiting them.
At some, guards refused to allow the inspectors entry while trucks were
frantically loaded up with suspicious equipment and driven away (This Week,
27 July).

Baghdad still maintains that it had no ambitions to produce nuclear
weapons, but that claim is not credible, says Molander. The special commission
examined huge plants designed to produce highly enriched uranium using two
separate technologies. The entire programme could have had no civilian purpose,
according to Hans Blix, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency,
and probably cost several billion dollars.

By contrast, the information Iraq provided on its ballistic missiles
and chemical warfare stocks seems so far to be reliable, says Molander.
Iraq admits having about 46 000 pieces of chemical munitions, including
bombs and artillery shells, in addition to 400 tonnes of the deadly chemicals
themselves and 2000 tonnes of the constituents needed to make them. Mustard
gas accounted for most of the stocks, but there were also supplies of the
nerve agent sarin. Although Iraq initially reported a low number, the discrepancy
resulted from differences in counting methods and the havoc caused by allied
bombing, says Molander.

The war devastated Iraq’s main centre for producing chemical weapons,
officially called the State Enterprise for Pesticide Production at Muthanna.
About 80 kilometres northwest of Baghdad, the site covers 25 square kilometres
of desert-like area. It is ‘a ruin’ says Molander, who visited the plant
in August. All the main buildings were completely destroyed. In a dramatic
demonstration of precision bombing, several dummy buildings at the site,
apparently built to serve as decoys, were left untouched.

Destruction of empty chemical munitions began two weeks ago. Eventually,
mustard gas will be burned, and the nerve agents will be destroyed by hydrolysis.
Molander says the commission has received offers from US companies seeking
to make profits by disposing of Iraq’s chemical stockpile. But the Iraqis
seem to have ‘quite an impressive capability’ to deal with their own chemical
agents safely. Cleaning up Muthanna completely will be a long and arduous
task, because the site is peppered with unexploded bombs and there is a
danger of leaking chemicals. When the first UN team visited the site, they
weren’t wearing protective suits. One member smelled the garlic-like odour
of mustard gas and quickly retreated.

Destruction of Iraq’s remaining 62 long-range missiles began even earlier.
The method was simple: huge bulldozers smashed the missiles into pieces
and crushed launch control computers by running over them. Last week, UN
inspectors found that Iraq had welded some of the missiles back together.
Iraqi officials claimed this was only to transport them more easily to a
disposal site, but UN officials regard the episode as one more piece of
evidence that Baghdad is not to be trusted.

The UN effort seems to be getting high marks from officials in other
countries. Ron Cleminson, head of verification research for Canada’s Department
of External Affairs, says he is ‘amazed’ at the speed with which the team
began its work. Ekeus’s staff combined an extraordinary amount of ‘political
awareness and technical competence’, says Cleminson. John Taylor, a scientist
at Sandia National Laboratory, in New Mexico, says that the teams have
worked ‘very smoothly and efficiently’.

Although the UN’s member countries have been happy to send technical
experts, they have been more wary about sharing their secrets, says Molander.
When an Iraqi defector told the US about his country’s programme to enrich
uranium using a method called electromagnetic isotope separation (This Week,
29 June), the US did not tell Ekeus and his staff. The UN official heard
the news first from the press.

The UN investigators also cannot get access to high-quality aerial and
satellite images, because the US refuses to share them. Images from commercial
satellites are far too expensive, says Molander, and their quality is much
poorer than images from military satellites or reconnaissance aircraft.

A few weeks ago, however, the US agreed to provide a U-2 spy plane,
which is now flying regularly over Iraq. The plane carries UN markings,
and goes where the UN commission tells it to go. ‘We ask for the targets
and we retain the imagery,’ says Molander. The commission is now recruiting
people to analyse the images.

Since the UN has never undertaken this type of work before, much of
the commission’s time has been spent on logistics, from finding transport
planes to setting up secure communications. They now have offices in Bahrain
and Baghdad, linked to New York by scrambler phones and fax devices supposedly
immune to eavesdropping. The Baghdad office has a satellite dish, bypassing
the local telephone system. It took months, however, to acquire cars in
Iraq, and the commission is still waiting for landing rights for two helicopters.

The commission requires all the members of its teams to be fluent in
English. As a result, says Molander, ‘you get fewer Russians, Chinese, and
Japanese than you’d like’. Every delegation is accompanied by a team trained
to dispose of mines and unexploded bombs.

When the commission began its work, many hoped that it might demonstrate
how an international agency could verify future arms control treaties such
as a ban on chemical weapons. Molander admits he had such hopes himself.
‘Some of us somewhat idealistically thought at the beginning that we could
really start looking ahead, and devise a system for Iraq that might be extended,’
he says. But the size of Iraq’s nuclear programme, and its stubborn attempts
to keep it secret, forced the UN to impose an extremely strict regime of
inspections on Iraq. No other country would voluntarily accept such a punitive
verification regime, says Molander. ‘I don’t think that this is a pilot
plant for a Middle East arrangement.’

Under the terms of resolutions adopted by the UN Security Council, Iraq
is supposed to be permanently barred from developing weapons of mass destruction.
But the details of how to enforce this ban remain to be worked out, and
the failure of efforts to permanently disarm Germany after the First World
War show how much can go wrong. The harshness of the Treaty of Versailles,
signed in 1919, and the lack of enforcement afterwards, are widely blamed
for the rise of Nazi militarism in the 1930s.

The Special Commission has asked the UN Security Council to approve
a plan for the permanent monitoring of Iraq, to prevent Baghdad from resurrecting
its military research. Under the plan, UN inspectors will have the right
to fly over Iraq at will and inspect any military or civilian facility.
Verification methods will have to be arranged to make sure that, for example,
chlorine, produced in a plant Iraq is now rebuilding, is used to protect
Baghdad’s water supply from disease and not used to make chemical weapons,
says Molander. No biological research on diseases that are not endemic to
the region will be permitted. Iraq also will not be permitted to handle
any nuclear materials except for radioactive isotopes.

The Special Commission will need to keep constant, long-term vigilance
on a regime which has already proved evasive. Its most difficult task is
yet to come.