Five hundred tons of yellowcake uranium ore stored at Saddam Hussein's al Tuwaitha nuclear weapons research laboratory near Baghdad could have been enriched to produce 142 nuclear weapons, a prominent British physicist has determined. In an op-ed piece for London's Evening Standard, Professor Dombey explained that standard yellowcake ore consists of 99 percent Uranium 238 [U238], "which is radioactive but is not used in normal nuclear weapons as it cannot sustain a chain reaction." To cause a nuclear chain reaction, he noted, "you need U235, which only makes up less than 1 percent [0.7] of natural uranium." After doing the calculations, Professor Dombey explained, "You have a warehouse containing 500 tons of natural uranium; you need 25 kilograms of U235 to build one weapon. How many nuclear weapons can you build? "The answer is 142." Though most reporters continue to insist that Iraq had abandoned its nuclear weapons program after the first Gulf War, chief U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer told Congress earlier this year that the Iraqi scientists were "preserving and expanding [their] knowledge to design and develop nuclear weapons." One laboratory at al Tuwaitha "was intentionally focused on research applicable for nuclear weapons development," the top weapons inspector revealed. Iraq War critics have argued that Saddam's uranium stockpile was safe because it was subject to once-a-year inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. But the IAEA was also in charge of monitoring North Korea's nuclear program right up until 2002, when Pyongyang announced it would begin producing nuclear weapons.
Addressing the claim by British intelligence last year that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger, Norman Dombey, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Sussex, argued, "Iraq already had far more uranium than it needed for any conceivable nuclear weapons programme."