UN weapons inspectors have made their first site visits in Iraq, amid indications that the teams are starting out with relatively uncontroversial industrial locations. However the tension could rise quickly after 8 December, when Iraq must declare all its âdual useâ facilities that could potentially be used for making weapons of mass destruction.
Two teams left the inspectorsâ headquarters on Wednesday morning. One visited the Al-Tahadi industrial complex 13 kilometres northeast of the city.
The factory, said to make machine parts for the oil and cement industries, would be a typical dual-use facility where machine tools might also be used to make parts for prohibited missiles or nuclear weapons. The inspectors were said to have found no problems there.
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The second team visited what was reported to be a graphite plant at Al-Amariyah, 40 kilometres southwest of Baghdad. Graphite can be used in nuclear reactors.
But it is also the location of the Al-Amariyah Sera and Vaccine Institute. Iraq insists the institute is not linked to its former biological weapons programme. But the last UN weapons inspectors in the 1990s suspected Iraq stored cultures of microbes salvaged from its bioweapons programmes there. And Britainâs dossier of suspicions about Iraqâs weapons programmes, issued in September, noted that the plant had recently expanded its storage capacity.
âUnfettered accessâ
The low-key initial inspections seem designed to win Iraqi cooperation. Cooperation is a key issue. The UN resolution passed on 8 November authorising the inspectorsâ work stresses that not only the deliberate concealment of weapons, but also failure to give inspectors âcomplete and unfetteredâ access to suspect sites would constitute a âmaterial breachâ of Iraqâs obligations. This would invite âserious consequencesâ â widely understood to mean a US-led invasion.
Inspectors have told 51¶ŻÂț that a proper inspection would probably take six months to a year. But US Secretary of State Colin Powell has noted: âWe will know early on whether or not Iraq is intending to cooperate.â
A key date will be December 8, when Iraq must declare all its weapons programmes â which it says it does not have â and any dual use facilities. Any differences between that declaration and what the inspectors, and Western intelligence, think is there will prompt the inspectors to visit contentious sites.
Prime suspect locations, according to UK and US dossiers, include:
 A castor oil plant at Fallujah which could also be producing the toxin ricin
 Al-QaâQa, where the phosgene production line appears to have been rebuilt â phosgene can be used to make chemical weapons
 A former uranium enrichment plant at Al-Sharquat where nitric acid, which can be used for purifying uranium and making missile fuel, is reportedly being produced behind heavily guarded walls
 Falujah 2, near Habbaniyah, which western sources say is producing suspiciously large quantities of chlorine and phenol
