(June 24 1994) Britain supplied technology for Iraq's clandestine nuclear-bomb program worth millions of pounds. Evidence of how British industry unknowingly aided Saddam Hussein's nuclear program has been kept secret for more than two years by the British authorities. But an examination of 1,100 pages of detailed inspection reports and other papers compiled by the United Nations exposes the extent to which British equipment was used by Iraq for its US$ 10 billion nuclear weapons project.
(414.4109) WISE Amsterdam - UN documents name 16 companies as manufacturers of British technology found at 10 Iraqi nuclear-bomb factories. America made just as much for Saddam Hussein's nuclear program, the Germans far more. Out of the 16 companies, 12 are British: Bridgeport, Colchester Lathes, FMT, Hadland Photonics, Harrison, Instron, Lumonics, Matrix Churchill, Millitorr, Morgan Rushworth, Renishaw-Probe and Wickman Bennett. The other four - Cincinnati Milacron, Fanuc, Handinge Brothers and Heidenhain - are foreign companies which made the equipment in Britain or received British export licences.
All the manufacturers say they were unaware of how their equipment was being used. They are all confident that no export controls were broken. In some cases technology was supplied to innocent-sounding organizations such as Baghdad University. In other cases companies say they did not know their products were destined for Iraq. The British technology had many applications, as does practically all equipment needed to build the bomb. Millitorr, for example, supplied equipment that it was told would be used to make "electrical components", but in fact it was used indirectly in the magnetic separation of uranium. Separately, two British export companies, Meed International and TDG, which were Iraqi defense procurement agents, are implicated as middlemen in Saddam's purchases of technology for the bomb program.
Ken Timmerman, former US congressional investigator and author of the book The Death Lobby - How the West armed Iraq, said vital evidence on suppliers was still being suppressed in Britain. "The British Government seized three truckloads of documents at the offices of TDG in London in August 1990. Those documents have never been made public. "It's clear that what they got were procurement records. Those documents should show who the Iraqis were doing business with, and what kind of political help they were getting. It's all there in those files and nobody's getting to see it. It's a can of worms that no one wants to open."
Source: Sunday Telegraph (UK), 29 May 1994
Contact: European Proliferation Information Centre, EPIC. 258 Pentonville Road, NI 9 JY London, UK