requires more vigilance than is currently the case, but it can be done.
Unfortunately, the Iraqis have proved to be extremely skilled at avoiding existing protections, and brilliant at shell-game hiding of the pieces of their nuclear program (likewise of their biological and chemical program) — thus exemplifying the uses of paranoia.
Ten years before the 1990 Gulf crisis, the Israelis bombed Iraqi nuclear research laboratories. This delayed but did not stop the nuclear program (and may have encouraged them to greater efforts at concealment).
After the war, United Nations inspection teams uncovered large caches of technical and historical records of Saddam’s nuclear program. These records indicated that U.S. intelligence organizations had been aware of only a portion of the Iraqi nuclear weapons efforts. Though prediction in this area is risky, some estimates claimed that Saddam’s scientists were within months of producing a workable nuclear device. Whether this could have been mated to the warhead of a Scud missile is another matter, and it is doubtful that Iraqi fighter-bomber aircraft could have penetrated the air defenses of Israel or Saudi Arabia.
Still, no matter how close Iraqi scientists were to building deliverable weapons, it was a no-brainer for Iraqi NBC programs to top Black Hole target lists. These facilities were going to be hit, and hit early. The risks were too great.
Precision munitions were dropped on the Baghdad Nuclear Weapons Research Center on the first three days of the war, though to what effect it was hard to say, except by counting holes in buildings and bunkers. Later, a mass raid against the Al Qaim nuclear facility failed. The forty F-16s found it defended by large numbers of AAA and SAM sites and obscured by smoke generators, and then the bombs from the first two aircraft raised so much dust that it was impossible for the remaining thirty-eight pilots to identify their aim points. The facility was later hit by a surprise F-117 night attack, which obliterated every assigned target.
But the fox, it turned out, had fled.
After the war, United Nations inspection teams learned that the Iraqis had already removed vital equipment from these locations and buried it in the desert (not a practice recommended for the sensitive, highly calibrated electronic devices used in nuclear research). In other words, from the Iraqi point of view, the cure may have been no better than the disease. If that was the case, then God was once again on the side of the good guys. Either way, the air attacks delayed the Iraqi quest for nuclear weapons for a few more years.
? In an earlier chapter the problem of preventing biological attack was discussed. There is little to add to that here.
Because production facilities for biological weapons are difficult to identify, intelligence and planning concentrated on storage facilities, usually in air-conditioned concrete earth-covered bunkers. Attacking these sites, however, remained a dilemma, owing to the possible spread of toxic agents in the dust and debris resulting from bomb explosions.
Despite this risk, the cross-shaped bunkers at the Salman Pak Biological Warfare Center were hit on the first night of the war by the same one-two punch that destroyed the presidential Rose Garden bunker. And, as previously mentioned, the resulting explosion was spectacular. Aircrews reported that heat from the secondary explosions went thousands of feet into the air.
In the event, attacking bio-weapons storage may have been just as futile as attacking nuclear production — though for different reasons. After the war, credible reports (from Saddam’s sons-in-law, later murdered) indicated that the Iraqis were just as worried as Americans that biological agents could infect the entire region, and had therefore destroyed their anthrax and botulism spores before the aerial onslaught risked spreading them. If this was true — and Chuck Horner believes it was likely (due to the absence of cases of either disease during the war) — then greater effort should have been aimed at identifying and targeting biological research and production facilities.
? Though chemical weapons are far from precision munitions, they pose less of a danger to attackers than biological agents, and their effects on an enemy are more immediate. Saddam possessed lots of them. U.S. intelligence sources indicated that large numbers of artillery shells and rockets were available for delivery of nerve and mustard gas.
The problem: though U.S. intelligence had located the manufacturing facilities for these weapons, there were so many of them, there wasn’t enough time for Chuck Horner’s bombers to destroy them all.
The initial attacks hit the largest of these facilities, at Samarra and Al-Habbanilyah near Baghdad, as well as chemical weapons, bombs, artillery, and missile warheads located in close proximity to delivery systems. For example, bunkers at Tallil Airfield were targeted the first night. And throughout the war, any indication of chemical weapons near Iraqi units that could face Coalition ground forces brought quick attack.
Just as with biological agents, the unintended release of chemical agents as a by-product of air attacks brought potential problems. Fortunately, the fallout of poisonous chemical debris had fewer long-term effects, since the hot dry desert air quickly degraded the potency of chemical agents, even in winter months.
THE GREAT SCUD HUNT
Finding and killing Scuds was part of the anti-NBC effort. No one in the Coalition or in Israel was eager to witness the successful mating of a weapon of mass destruction to a ballistic missile launched at Riyadh or Tel Aviv. In the event, finding and killing mobile Scuds proved to be a nightmare.
During the War of the Cities phase of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, both nations tossed Scuds at each other’s capital. To military analysts, not much was achieved by this seemingly senseless expenditure of obsolete ballistic missiles. To civilians in Tehran and Baghdad, however, it was a very significant event indeed when an Iraqi or Iranian missile slammed into some neighborhood they knew. Later, Chuck Horner made himself familiar with that war (since it was waged in a part of the world he was expected to know well), yet these missile attacks did not greatly concern him. As he quickly came to learn in the early weeks of 1991, however, the people living near Iran and Iraq were not so sanguine. After the War of the Cities, Saudi Arabia had acquired very expensive long-range ballistic missiles, to deter its neighbors to the north and east. Israel also had missiles — and very likely the nuclear weapons to go with them.
No one had any doubt that Saddam expected to use his Scuds, and in October, his threats couldn’t have been more emphatic. “In the event of war,” he announced, “I’ll attack Saudi Arabia and Israel with long-range missiles… And I’ll burn Israel.” In December, he had test-fired his modified, longer-range Scuds. (This had a consequence he did not foresee: It gave U.S. space forces an invaluable opportunity to check out the space-based warning satellites and communications link from the U.S. Space command in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Now they could read out the infrared signals sent by the satellites, and from the template they put together after the December tests, they could tell with reasonable certainty whether or not a Scud had been launched.)
Chuck Horner’s team was ready.
Plans called for preemptive attacks against Scud production facilities and storage areas (including missile fuel tanks). All the fixed launch pads painstakingly erected in Iraq’s western desert were bombed in the opening moments of the war. And on day two, multiple attacks were made on the Latifiyah rocket-fuel plants and on rocket-motor production facilities at Shahiyat, all near Baghdad. Because the fuel the Scuds used was unstable, it could be stored for only perhaps four to six weeks. Therefore, fuel-production facilities were bombed, with the expectation that Scud attacks would stop when the “good” fuel was used up. Unfortunately, the Iraqis didn’t follow this script, either because the Coalition failed to destroy all the Scud fuel-production facilities, or because the Iraqis failed to read the instructions that told them not to use old fuel. They were able to fire the missiles well into the last nights of the war.
Meanwhile, billions of dollars of satellites over Iraq searched for the hot flash of a launching Scud and predicted the warhead’s target. There were civil defense warning systems. And there was the Patriot. In September, the antiballistic missile version, the PAC-2s, had been rushed to the region and deployed near airports and seaports, in order to protect entryways for forces deploying into the Arabian peninsula.
What was lacking, as Horner had informed Secretary Cheney, was the means to locate and kill the mobile
