DECEPTION ACTIVITIES
"If Iraq stucks to their story that they have no weapons of mass destruction, I would interpret that to mean they feel that war is inevitable, so why give away anything?"
-David Albright
Institute for Science and International Security
Although in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), and several other pacts not to pursue the production of nuclear and biological warfare, Iraq has been successfully deceiving not only the United States, but countries all over the world when it comes to their biological and nuclear weapons development.
PAST DECEPTIONS
In 1991, the Security Council approved resolution 715. This established a "multi-layered monitoring system" which was created to carefully inspect any of Iraq's special weapons and related research, linking to the devlopment, testing, and manufacturing facilities of the country (Source A). However, the commission of this program did not begin to go to work, operating the continuing monitoring and verification system for Iraq's missile and related facilities, unitl August of 1994 (Source A).
Iraqi deception was detected at an early stage by the United Nations Special Commission and IAEA (Source A). In June of 1991, special inspection teams discovered equipment and material related to the development of nuclear weapons programs at a military facility in ABU Gharib, which is located just west of Baghdad. Although Iraq was able to block these teams to access the material, the teams were still able to collect photographic evidence of this illegal development. From these pictures, the teams were able to prove the existence of undeclared equipment (Source A). Due to this deception, on July 7, 1991, a special High Level committee, created by the United Nations Special Commission and the IAEA, decided that Iraq must declare its entire nuclear program to the Commission and the IAEA (Source A).
As a result of this decision, Iraq divided its missile force into two parts. The first part, it would present to the Commission for destruction, and the second part, they retained illegally. However, Iraq claims that they decided to destroy this secret missile force, and the destruction supposedly took place in July of 1991. In contrast to this claim, in 1997, UNSCOM was informed by Iraq that some of the prohibited weapons and materials were still withheld.
When Iraq realized that the United Nations was aware of such discrepancies, and was questioned by the United Nations, it addressed the matter under question in a letter to the Security Council on November 17, 1997, noting, "Unilateral destruction was carried out entirely unrecorded. No written and no visual records were kept, as it was not forseen that Iraq needed to prove the destruction to anybody" (Source A).
The amount of proscribed weapons that Iraq illegally retained included almost two-thirds of their operational missil force, more than half of their chemical weapons, and all of their biological weapons (Source A).
UNILATERAL DESTRUCTION
Weapons Proscribed by Iraq Declared Retained
Operational Missiles 48 85
Conventional Warheads 18 83
Special Warheads 30 45
Operational Launchers 5 9
Non-Oper. Launchers 5 0
Empty and Filled Chemical Weapons 38,000 46,000
Biological Weapons 0 ALL WEAPONS
(Information provided by Source A)