Iraq's Declaration In U.N. Hands

Iraq's arms declaration was handed over to the U.N. nuclear agency Sunday for a lengthy and painstaking analysis of Saddam Hussein's claims that he has no atomic weapons or programs to develop them.

A senior U.N. nuclear weapons inspector accompanied a 2,100-page dossier dealing with nuclear issues to Vienna, headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is heading the hunt in Iraq for nuclear arms and the long-range ballistic missiles capable of delivering warheads to distant targets.

At Vienna's airport, the inspector passed a green carry-on suitcase containing the documents to Jacques Baute, a French scientist who heads the IAEA's Iraq Action Team and has been overseeing the inspection mission in Baghdad.

Baute told reporters the documents would be given to a team that would screen it "in order to assess what amount of effort we need to put into this coming week in order to do what we are requested to do."

Analysts were to begin their work Sunday night, "including the painstaking and systematic cross-checking of the information provided by Iraq against information which the IAEA already has," IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei said.

ElBaradei said the dossier also would be checked against information from member states and data collected in Iraq by past and present inspection teams. He said the IAEA hoped to provide the Security Council with a preliminary analysis within 10 days, and a more detailed analysis when it reports back at the end of January.

The documents arrived in Vienna via Cyprus a day after the Iraqi government turned over three sets to U.N. officials in Baghdad as required by the latest Security Council resolution. That resolution gave Iraq until Sunday to detail its weapons programs and stockpiles. Iraq insists it has none.

The other two copies — one for the council, one for the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission overseeing the search for biological and chemical agents — were being flown to U.N. headquarters in New York on Sunday.

The declaration, in Arabic and English with an 80-page summary and nearly 12,000 pages overall, was contained in at least a dozen bound volumes accompanied by computer disks. It covers such subjects as the 1990s U.N. weapons inspection regime in Iraq, when many arms and much production equipment were destroyed, and "dual-use" industries that can serve both civilian and military purposes.

The United States has threatened war against Iraq if, in its view, Baghdad has not met U.N. arms control demands. Bush administration officials say they have "solid evidence" that Iraq retains weapons of mass destruction, and will eventually supply it to U.N. inspectors.

Saddam's science adviser, Gen. Amer al-Saadi, called the declaration "accurate, comprehensive and truthful" Sunday and challenged those who contend otherwise to come forward with proof.

The IAEA has said that continued inspections are the only way to ascertain whether the claims in the Iraqi report are truthful. Although agency experts planned to begin analyzing the declaration immediately, they cautioned that it would take weeks to draw even preliminary conclusions.

The declaration will be checked against an IAEA database containing hundreds of thousands of documents. UNMOVIC, the team looking for biological and chemical weapons, will do a separate analysis against a database of more than 1 million pages.

The U.N. investigators, who returned to Iraq two weeks ago after a four-year absence, resumed their daily surprise inspections Sunday with 25 additional inspectors, most from the nuclear agency.

The previous U.N. weapons inspection regime collapsed in December 1998 amid U.N.-Iraqi disputes over access to sites and Iraqi allegations that some of the inspectors were spies.

If Iraq is eventually found to have cooperated fully with the inspectors, U.N. resolutions call for the Security Council to consider lifting economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990.

By the end of the 1991 Gulf War, inspectors discovered the oil-rich nation had imported thousands of pounds of uranium, some of which was already refined for weapons use, and had considered two types of nuclear delivery systems.

Inspectors seized the uranium, destroyed facilities and chemicals, dismantled over 40 missiles and confiscated thousands of documents.