The United States yesterday began providing copies of Iraq’s declaration of its weapons of mass destruction programs to the other four permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — China, France, Russia and the United Kingdom, diplomats said (see GSN, Dec. 9).

The United States had been chosen to make the copies for security reasons, said U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.  “We have been asked to ensure that the document is copied in a controlled environment in order to guard against the inadvertent release of information,” he said.

On Saturday, Iraq provided two copies of its 12,000-page declaration to U.N. inspectors in Iraq.  One copy was divided between the International Atomic Energy Agency, which received sections relevant to Iraq’s nuclear weapons efforts, and the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission.  UNMOVIC brought the second complete copy to New York to give to the Security Council (Agence France-Presse, Dec. 9).

On Sunday, the United States obtained the second copy of the Iraqi declaration and began providing it to the other four permanent Security Council members, according to Reuters.  U.S. officials gave France and the United Kingdom copies yesterday in Washington, while Russia and China asked for their versions to be sent back to New York, diplomats said (Reuters/MSNBC, Dec. 9).

According to UNMOVIC, the declaration that the United States took to Washington is now at the United Nations.

Commenting on the decision to supply an unedited declaration only to the five permanent council members, British Ambassador Jeremy Greenstock said today that the other council members might feel “uncomfortable, but they have to take on board that there is a nonproliferation element to this” (Jim Wurst, Global Security Newswire, Dec. 10).

The 10 nonpermanent council members should receive an edited copy of the Iraqi declaration in about a week, Reuters reported.  UNMOVIC is expected to remove information that might pose proliferation risks from their versions.  U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix is expected to tell the Security Council today how long that process should take.  Several council members have said that the edited information should not be used later to determine whether Iraq is in material breach of the U.N. resolution because they would not have the ability to determine the information’s veracity, Reuters reported (Reuters/MSNBC).

By obtaining its copy of the Iraqi declaration early, the United States reversed a decision that the Security Council made Friday to wait to give the declaration to all council members until inspectors had screened it, according to the New York Times.  That process might have taken up to 10 days, however, and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice did not want to wait that long, U.S. officials said (Julia Preston, New York Times, Dec. 10).

The current president of the Security Council, Colombian Ambassador Alfonso Valdivieso, yesterday defended reversing the council agreement on who should receive a copy of the full declaration.  He said U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte phoned him Saturday morning saying the United States “wanted to make some changes to the previous understanding and that was it.”  Valdivieso received calls “from other members” of the council and consulted with “all the members, many times,” he said.

“This is a sensitive issue and we cannot risk proliferation and the way to avoid that is to provide [the declaration] to the members that have the expertise,” Valdivieso said.  “The worst thing I could do is not exercise my responsibility, and I did it,” he added (Wurst, Global Security Newswire).

Most nonpermanent Security Council members agreed, albeit reluctantly in some cases, to wait for edited copies of the declaration, diplomats from those countries said (Preston, New York Times).

“It’s a way of getting through an existing problem,” he said.  “The expertise brought to bear will save time and will bring a text to the council within the next matter of days which we will all examine together,” he added (Wurst, Global Security Newswire).

Syria, however, strongly objected and criticized Colombia for violating basic diplomatic procedures, the Times reported.

“We are not happy,” said Mikhail Wehbe, Syria’s U.N. ambassador.  “It is in contradiction to the political logic, to the procedural logic, to every kind of logic the Security Council used to work on,” he said.

White House officials said that the five permanent members do not need to wait for a screened declaration because they already possess nuclear weapons.

“We would have nothing to gain in terms of proliferation from reading an unsanitized version, because we already have that information,” a U.S. official said.

“This is not a question of asserting some special privilege,” Negroponte said.  “It’s more a question of drawing on the expertise of declared nuclear weapons states” to accelerate analysis of the declaration, he added (Preston, New York Times).

First Glimpse

Iraq has also submitted a Dec. 7 letter from Foreign Minister Naji Sabri that is, in effect, a table of contents for the 12,000-page declaration.  The eight-page document, which is circulating at the United Nations but has not been officially published, lists sites and techniques relevant to Iraq’s production of ballistic missiles and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

The bare-bones document sheds little light on what is in the declaration.  The word “former” describes some of the programs, nuclear locations are divided into “major” and “secondary” sites, and the number of pages in each section is noted.

The Sabri letter also refers to a 5,047-page annex containing “supporting documents” on Iraq’s “former programs in the field of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles since the establishment of those programs.”  Sabri wrote that some of the “detailed information, in particular the parts relating to research and development and techniques for the production of agents and weapons, entails risk and is inconsistent with the norms of the weapons nonproliferation regime.”

Of the four sections listed in the letter, the nuclear declaration is apparently the longest at 2,081 pages.  The letter lists several techniques useful for producing nuclear weapons — including electromagnetic isotope separation and gaseous centrifuge — but without details it is not possible to know whether Iraq is claiming these activities have halted or whether it is claiming them as nonmilitary operations.

Eight locations, including Tuwaitha, which IAEA inspectors visited again today, are listed as “major sites.”  Before the Gulf War, Tuwaitha was the primary site for Iraq’s nuclear weapons program.  The letter also lists as major sites al-Athir, al-Farat and Tarmiya, which had been a facility for uranium enrichment.

Of the four declarations, only the chemical declaration has a heading for “foreign technical assistance.”

Muthanna, near Samarra, is listed under the biological declaration but is regularly cited as a chemical facility.  The last report by UNMOVIC’s predecessor, UNSCOM, lists Muthanna as a major chemical weapons facility, and UNMOVIC reported last week that it had found artillery rounds of mustard gas at the site.  Iraq said these are old weapons left over from the early 1990s.  According to nongovernmental research organization GlobalSecurity.org, Iraq’s biological weapons program shifted from Muthanna to al-Salman in 1987.  Work on anthrax and botulinum toxin is going on at al-Salman, according to GlobalSecurity.org.

Under the missile declaration, Iraq lists the “Ibn Firnas Company for remotely piloted aircraft.”  The existence of this drone program was cited by President George W. Bush as one of the reasons that Iraq is a threat to the United States (Wurst, Global Security Newswire).

It appears from the Sabri letter that Iraq is merely resubmitting old reports, said David Albright, a former U.N. nuclear inspector.  The list of contents “seems to confirm that on the nuclear side, the declaration has been recycled.  A lot of this is pre-1991,” he added (Dafna Linzer, Associated Press/Yahoo.com, Dec. 10).

Inspections

In Iraq, U.N. inspectors visited five sites today — a phosphate mine, a veterinary site, a chemical company, a research facility and the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center, according to reports.

About 25 additional inspectors are scheduled to arrive in Iraq later today, bringing the total to about 70, inspectors said.  Leaders of the U.N. inspection teams said they hope to field eight teams in Iraq by the end of the year.

An IAEA team traveled today to a phosphate mining facility in Ashakat, located about 250 miles west of Baghdad.  During the 1980s, Iraq mined about 100 tons of uranium over six years from the phosphate deposits at the site, AP reported.  The U.N. team that made an unannounced visit to Ashakat today did so to reassess the site’s current operations and compare that information with what was learned by inspectors in the 1990s, according to AP.

UNMOVIC inspectors reportedly visited a veterinary medical site located at Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad.  The site is believed to be the Amariyah Serum and Vaccine Institute, where Iraq conducted biological weapon-related research in the 1980s, according to AP.  The United States has argued that the institute has expanded its storage capacity beyond what it would need for legitimate research (Charles Hanley, Associated Press/Yahoo.com, Dec. 10).

Other U.N. inspectors visited al-Furat Chemical Industries General Company, about 40 miles south of Baghdad, and bin al-Haitham research facility, located in the northern Baghdad suburb of Wazireyah (Reuters/MSNBC, Dec. 10).

Additional IAEA inspectors visited the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center today (Hanley, Associated Press).

IAEA experts visited three Iraqi sites yesterday — the Tuwaitha site, Ash Shakyli and al-Qa Qaa.  At the Ash Shakyli site, inspectors visited the site’s buildings and took samples to detect the presence of radiological materials.  At al-Qa Qaa, IAEA experts began preparing an inventory of known explosive materials from Iraq’s previous nuclear weapons program that had been under IAEA control.

Also yesterday, an UNMOVIC team visited the Fallujah 2 site of the al-Tariq Company, which is located near the previously visited Fallujah 3 site.  The Fallujah 2 site consists of the al-Tariq Company’s headquarters and a factory area, but inspectors only visited the factory area, according to an IAEA press statement.  The site contains several dual-use items tagged during previous inspections, which inspectors reconfirmed (International Atomic Energy Agency release, Dec. 9).

For further information, see:

UNMOVIC

IAEA Iraq Action Team

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