'Poor man's atomic bomb' a threat

The crisis in Iraq has boiled up rather quickly. Obstruction of a UN team set up by a Security Council resolution is serious. But there is international ambivalence, not, perhaps, because Saddam has split the Security Council, but because foot-dragging on UN resolutions and breaches of international law have occurred, and been defended, before now. The UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) teams have been in Iraq for six-and-a-half years. Why were the illegal Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction programmes not discovered earlier? The answer may lie in the huge size of the country.

Progress summaries were issued by the UN and the International Atomic Energy Agency in October. They rang alarms bells. Briefly, "significant progress" has been achieved in the missile area. Chemical weapons equipment has been destroyed, but more access and information is needed on warheads and VX (a nerve agent).

The nuclear investigations are satisfactory. The emphasis is now on future supervision. This is solid progress but the serious problem lies in Iraq's biological weapons programme. In April, a team found evidence of a production programme for anthrax, botulinus toxin and bubonic and pneumonic plague agents. Chemical and biological agents are sometimes called the "poor man's atomic bomb". They are not expensive to produce and for a country like Iraq, faced with Israel's nuclear weapons, they are a temptation.

The Iraqi forces are hardly fit for a military confrontation. They have about 2,700 main battle tanks, including about 700 fairly modern Russian T72s. By contrast, Israel has 4,300 - almost all modern or upgraded. The Iraqi air force sent its most modern aircraft to Iran in 1991, including the then quite outstanding MiG29s. This was a desperate attempt to get them out of reach of the US Air Force. Iran, not surprisingly if we remember the Iran-Iraq war, held on to the planes. Iraq has about 300 fighter and ground attack aircraft left. Like the army's tanks, the planes are suffering from spares shortages. Israel probably has about 2,000 (some are in store).

A COUNTRY contemplating conflict with a first-class power, not to mention a superpower, needs a comprehensive air-defence system, with "hardened" (underground) control centres. Iraq had a good, but not fully up-to-date Russian system in 1991. The American air force tore the system open and largely destroyed it in the first few hours of the attack on Baghdad.

From then on, the Iraqis were largely radar-blind, without the ability to detect intruding aircraft or direct fighters to intercept the Americans. Egypt was in a similar situation after the Israeli pre-emptive attack before the Six Day War in 1967.

Iraq has been trying to modernise its air defences; there have been reports of an attempt to buy the Czech Tatar system, claimed to be able to deal with the American electronic warfare planes. This seems unlikely. Saddam was quoted as saying that his anti-aircraft (AA) guns would shoot down the American U2 spy-plane if it overflew his country last Monday. This was absurd. Whatever about his (rather outdated) AA missiles, AA guns could not reach the heights at which the U2 flies. He has about 6,000 air-defence guns. Some types were effective on the Suez Canal in 1973 and some are more recent. Their function would be to try to keep attack aircraft above the level where easy bombing could be carried out.

There is a variety of old AA missiles - again with a few more modern ones. One imagines that the Americans have worked out methods of electronically confusing them before now.

Outdated Russian missiles had a few successes but many misses in the former Yugoslavia. When the NATO (largely American) aircraft were unleashed the Serbian defences were quickly overwhelmed and the artillery above Sarajevo went silent. If Iraq sees no end to sanctions is there an incentive to cooperate.