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Iraq Scientists Say They Lied Over Weapons
By CHARLES J. HANLEY

Iraqi scientists never revived their long-dead nuclear bomb program, and in fact lied to Saddam Hussein about how much progress they were making before U.S.-led attacks shut the operation down for good in 1991, Iraqi physicists say.

Before that first Gulf War, the chief of the weapons program resorted to ``blatant exaggeration'' in telling Iraq's president how much bomb material was being produced, key scientist Imad Khadduri writes in a new book.

Other leading physicists, in Baghdad interviews, said the hope for an Iraqi atomic bomb was never realistic. ``It was all like building sand castles,'' said Abdel Mehdi Talib, Baghdad University's dean of sciences.

Seven months after a U.S.-British invasion toppled Saddam's Baath Party government, Iraqi scientists have grown more vocal in countering Bush administration claims, used to justify the war, that Baghdad had ``reconstituted'' nuclear weapons development, and that it once was a mere six months from making a bomb. ...

...``They put a lot of lies on Saddam Hussein,'' he said in a Baghdad interview. ``They took a lot of money out of him through what you call, in English, bluffing.'' When their installations were finally demolished, it ``saved their necks'' by burying their mistakes, he said. ``They could tell Saddam, `There's nothing left.'''...