ARABS-UN - Feb. 20 - Libya Had Diverse Nuclear Weapons Programme.

Libya secretly assembled a wide range of nuclear materials, technology, expertise and weapons design and had produced a small amount of plutonium as part of a nuclear weapons programme, says a confidential report by IAEA Dir-Gen Mohamed ElBaradei . It will be discussed by IAEA board members next week. The report reveals Libyan efforts to develop nuclear weapons began in the 1980s, but stopped after 1992, when an unnamed foreign expert involved in the programme left Libya. The programme was relaunched in 1997 when new foreign suppliers were found (assumed to be Pakistan). Libya's early efforts to develop its programme began with exports of uranium ore concentrate to an unnamed nuclear weapons state in 1985. This was then transferred back to Libya in the form of uranium compounds that could be used in the uranium enrichment process. One of the uranium compounds it received was UF6, a low enriched uranium gas better known as uranium hexafluoride (essential in the enrichment process necessary to build nuclear weapons). Libyan officials told the IAEA they had imported and stored the gas as recently as February 2001. Libya's reliance on imports of uranium hexafluoride was a big weakness in its production process which it had tried and failed to overcome, the report states. However, the report says Libyan scientists at the Tajura nuclear research reactor had succeeded in extracting small quantities of plutonium from uranium, which could then have been used as the explosive element in a nuclear weapon. The report goes on to say that in 1997 Libya began to gather the parts needed to build centrifuges to enrich uranium. It began to assemble a group of nine centrifuges - called a "cascade" - in 2000. Its first successful test of a centrifuge was in October 2000, and three cascades had been assembled by April 2002. However, the cascades were then disassembled and moved for security reasons, and have remained packed in boxes ever since, the report says. Components for 10,000 more sophisticated centrifuges began to arrive in Libya in December 2002. Evidence that Libya intended to diminish steadily its reliance on foreign suppliers is detailed in the IAEA report, and also in a Malaysian police report into the alleged role of Malaysian companies in the provision of nuclear-related equipment to Libya, which was published on Feb. 20. The IAEA report identifies a site at Janzour, where a precision workshop was located, which it says was intended "to establish a domestic production capability". The Malaysian report identifies a site called the "Project Machine Shop 1001", which, the report states, "was a project to set up a workshop in Libya to make centrifuge components which could not be obtained from outside Libya".