Libya Nuclear Program May Have
Received Outside Aid

Paraphrased by:
Steve Waldrop
December 30, 2003

TRIPOLI, Libya - Libya received its nuclear technology from a "sophisticated" international network but not necessarily with the knowledge of any government, U.N. nuclear chief, Mohamed ElBaradei said, after touring four atomic sites and meeting with the country's leader, Moammar Gadhafi.

ElBaradei also said Libya's technology was of a "familiar design," meaning its origins would not be hard to trace and that its nuclear program was not advanced.

"What we have seen is a program in the very initial stages of development," he said.

The United States, which believes Libya's weapons programs are more extensive, will send its own experts to help dismantle them, a senior Bush administration official said. The CIA and British intelligence believes there are 11 sites in Libya connected to weapons work, the official said.

Gadhafi assured ElBaradei that Libya would cooperate fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency and eliminate its long-secret nuclear program, saying he wanted to turn Libya into a "mainstream" nation, IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said.

Gwozdecky said Libya's program had been too low-level to be detected previously by the IAEA. "There is no way you can find something that is at the nascent stage," he said, adding that with new inspections "we are at a much better stage to detect activities."

Gadhafi's admission that Libya had been seeking nuclear weapons and his decision to renounce them, made after months of secret negotiations with the United States and Britain, came as surprise to the IAEA, the U.N. body charged with keeping watch on nuclear programs.

ElBaradei and an IAEA team toured four nuclear facilities in Tripoli , finding equipment dismantled and packed into crates. ElBaradei said that based on what the team saw, Libya reached only an experimental level in its attempts to enrich uranium, the essential material for a bomb.

ElBaradei discussed future inspections of Libya's nuclear sites with Prime Minister Shokri Ghanem and Deputy Prime Minister Matouq Mohammed Matouq, who heads the country's nuclear program.

Libyan Foreign Minister Abdul-Rahman Shalqam told AP that ElBaradei's visit was "an exploratory mission and not with the aim of inspecting sites." He also said Libya possessed only "research operations and not active programs."

ElBaradei said the origins of Libya's imported equipment could easily be identified as it was "of a familiar design."

He said a "sophisticated network" of suppliers was behind the technology: "a number of different people in a number of different places, a network which you can call a cartel but not necessarily with the knowledge of a particular country or countries. It has been across many countries in the world."

He declined to reveal the number, names or training of Libyan scientists but said they were "well competent scientists."

In their meeting, Gadhafi told ElBaradei he had been considering dismantling Libya's programs "for more than 10 years, until he finally decided "security was better achieved without any" WMD activity, Gwozdecky said.

"We haven't seen any enriched uranium," ElBaradei told reporters. "We haven't seen any industrial-scale facility to produce highly enriched uranium."

ElBaradei said that It would have been "a question of years, not a question of months" before Libya could have produced weapons-grade uranium.

Libya has promised to cooperate with the U.N. nuclear agency and said it would sign a protocol allowing intrusive inspections at short notice.

Libya's nuclear facts

A study taken in 2002 indicates that Libya has taken steps to acquire weapons of mass destruction and systems to deliver them. In the late 1980's with the conflict with Chad, Libya became one of the few countries to have employed chemical weapons.

Nuclear weapon capability
Does not possess nuclear weapons or unsafeguarded stocks of nuclear, weapons-usable material.

Operates one 10-megawatt light-water research reactor.

Interest in pursuing a nuclear weapon is unclear.

Biological and chemical weapon capability

Believed to have a biological weapon program, but it has not advanced beyond basic research and development. It may have the capability to produce small quantities of agents, but without foreign assistance and technical expertise, it is not likely to make significant progress beyond its current stage.

Appears to have a goal of establishing an offensive chemical weapon capability and a production facility for those weapons.

Missile capability
Possesses a limited and aging arsenal of Scud–B missiles that it obtained from the Soviet Union in the 1970s.

Libya is struggling to develop the Al Fatah missile. Though this missile has a reported range of 590 miles, the US Department of Defense assesses its range at 125 miles.

Not believed to have aircraft capable of delivering a nuclear payload.

SOURCE: "Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction" Joseph Cirincione, Jon Wolfsthal, Miriam Rajkumar (Carnegie Endowment, 2002