In the eyes of tinpot dictators and other insecure regimes, nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons—especially when mated with ballistic missiles—are the visible symbols that make small nations into big players on the world’s stage. The Iraqis have spent billions of dollars in research and development of such weapons.

The potential for large-scale tragedy is obvious, and tinpot dictators are indifferent by nature to the crucial insight that major powers long ago took to heart: that NBC weapons are not weapons of war but weapons of terror. What goes around comes around. You hit me; I hit you. To add to this unsettling thought, Saddam Hussein had already proved willing to use weapons of mass destruction both in foreign wars and against his own people.

Fortunately, the most fearsome of these weapons, the nuclear, are the hardest to make, and the programs to make them are the easiest to discover. The manufacture of nuclear weapons requires skilled engineers and scientists, a vast array of high-technology facilities, weapons-grade nuclear material, and other rare ingredients. Few of these are easily available to nations such as Iraq; and all of them can be protected and tracked. This 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.