BRITAIN: Downing Street has welcomed a "highly significant" independent report concluding that Iraq has amassed an arsenal of biological and chemical weapons and remains determined to acquire a nuclear capacity.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said President Saddam Hussein's "enduring interest" in creating weapons of mass destruction rendered the threat from Iraq greater than ever before. And it raised the spectre that Iraq could probably produce a nuclear bomb "within months", if it obtained necessary radioactive material from abroad.
However, the IISS also said Iraq itself did not possess facilities to produce fissile material (enriched uranium or plutonium) in sufficient amounts for nuclear bombs, and that it would need several years, and extensive foreign assistance, to build such fissile material production facilities. While it could probably assemble nuclear weapons within months if fissile material was obtained from foreign sources - a friendly government or on the international black market - the report acknowledged there was no evidence to date that this had happened.
As the Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, travelled to the TUC Congress in Blackpool to face powerful trades union opposition to war, his official spokesman said the IISS report painted "a powerful picture of a highly unstable regime". This was "clearly a very serious piece of work" conducted without any access to the kind of intelligence materials which might be included in the government's own promised dossier of "evidence" against Mr Saddam.
However, the Liberal Democrat's respected foreign affairs spokesman, Mr Menzies Campbell, insisted the IISS report was not a significant contribution to the debate over Iraq, while one defence expert said it contained no new "killer fact" to make the case for war.
Mr Paul Weaver, of Jane's Defence Weekly, said: "This report is a very good document, the best compilation of the facts I have seen. But there's nothing new here, no killer fact that makes me believe we should go to war tomorrow." While agreeing that Mr Saddam "needs to know the West is prepared to remove him", he thought Mr Blair's promised dossier would have to contain something more dramatic.
Mr Campbell echoed that: "This report contains nothing startling, nor anything that could not have been inferred from Iraq's previous behaviour. If the British government is to persuade public opinion and the House of Commons that Iraq not only possesses, but has the imminent intention of using, weapons of mass destruction, it will have to provide something better than this report."
And the British debate was fuelled last night as the IISS report itself laid bare the dilemma facing Mr Blair, President Bush and the leaders of governments across the international community. The IISS director, Dr John Chipman, warned: "War, sanctions and inspections have reversed and retarded, but not eliminated, Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and long-range missile capacity, nor removed Baghdad's enduring interest in developing these capabilities." Governments, he said, must now assess what to do given the relative risks: "Wait, and the threat will grow. Strike, and the threat may be used."
Dr Denis Gormley, a senior Fellow of IISS, said without the necessary fissile material, Iraq could be several years off acquiring a nuclear capacity and that the threat from Saddam's biological weapons was the most worrisome. Even with a completely unfettered weapons inspection regime, these were the most difficult weapons to detect, since Mr Saddam had access to a number of mobile laboratories capable of being moved from place to place.
The report said Iraq had probably retained substantial growth media and biological weapons agents (perhaps thousands of litres of anthrax), was capable of resuming production at short notice (within weeks), and could have produced thousands of litres of anthrax, botulinum and other agents since the last weapons inspections in 1998.
The TUC last night backed a leadership motion demanding "hard evidence" to justify any military action against Iraq, which should in any event be sanctioned by the United Nations.