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Iraq is already using copies of pirated German equipment to process nuclear material for an atomic weapons program, according to a former Iraqi nuclear scientist who testified before the U.S. Senate this summer.
Khidir Hamza, who led a section of the Iraqi nuclear bomb program before his defection in 1994, said the devices may not be discovered even if U.N. inspectors are allowed to return to Iraq.
"The beauty of the present system is that the units are each very small, and in the four years since the inspectors left, they will have been concealed underground or in basements or buildings that outwardly seem normal."

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"The amount of uranium it already has — conservatively estimated in a German intelligence report at 10 tons of natural uranium and 1.3 tons of low-enriched uranium — is enough for three nuclear weapons," Mr. Hamza said

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The key was provided, he said, when German Karl Schaab showed the Iraqis how to build and operate a centrifuge in 1989, and later helped them build a second

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"The whole centrifuge method of getting to a bomb is much easier for Iraq than, for example, it was for Pakistan, which took 17 years in going the same route," Mr. Hamza said. "They had to get it in bits and pieces, whereas we got a whole centrifuge and all the plans

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Mr. Hamza, who was working on Saddam's weapons program when Israeli jets bombed the French-supplied 40-megawatt Osirak research reactor in 1981, confirmed long-held suspicions that the facility was to have been used to develop nuclear weapons material.
Scientists had planned not to divert the existing French-supplied highly enriched nuclear fuel — enough for one bomb — but rather blanket the reactor with natural or depleted uranium, which would produce plutonium. That would have made it possible to continue producing, eventually allowing repeated bomb production.

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