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had signed the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear
Weapons, Iraq had secretly been working on a nuclear bomb,
perhaps since the 1970s. Experts believed that by 1991 Iraq was
just a few years away from becoming a nuclear power.
In early June of 1991, the United Nations Special Commission
on Disarmament (UNSCOM) began searching Iraq for weapons of
mass destruction. UNSCOM inspectors found and destroyed chem-
ical weapons and proscribed missiles. They also concluded that
Saddam’s scientists had been considerably closer to developing
nuclear weapons than Western intelligence analysts had suspected.
By late 1994, UNSCOM believed it was close to finishing its
work. However, rumors emerged that Iraq had an undeclared bio-
logical weapons program, something that the country’s leaders
acknowledged in July 1995. The next month, Saddam’s son-in-law,
Hussein Kamel, who had been in charge of Iraq’s proscribed
weapons programs, defected. As a result of Kamel’s defection,
UNSCOM learned that Iraq had retained significant amounts of
chemical agents, along with some missiles and other delivery sys-
tems. Iraq, however, never turned over any of that material. The
Iraqis claimed they had destroyed it unilaterally, even though the
U.N. cease-fire resolution called for UNSCOM to supervise destruc-
tion of that material.
Short of another full-scale war to remove Saddam Hussein from
power—a course of action that lacked broad international sup-
port—the options for convincing Iraq to disarm were fairly limited.
One option was the periodic bombing of selected targets. Another
was continuation of the economic sanctions that the U.N. had
imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. It was believed that
restricting Iraq’s trade with other countries would not only pressure
Saddam to comply with the disarmament requirements, but also, if
he resisted, limit his ability to rebuild his military and weapons
programs.
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