We tried to build an atom bomb, says Iraqi weapons chief

United Nations inspectors visited a nuclear complex for the third time yesterday, 12 hours after Saddam Hussein's chief scientific adviser disclosed how close Iraq had come to making an atomic bomb.

Iraq's report to the UN contains 2,081 pages on its nuclear programme alone, and supposedly confirms that Baghdad used domestic and foreign facilities in an effort to manufacture the Arab world's first atomic bomb.

Lieutenant-General Amer al-Saadi referred to work undertaken to develop a "trigger" and make "the final shape of the device". He said: "In scientific jargon device means bomb. It is up to the IAEA [the International Atomic Energy Agency] to judge how close we were. We haven't reached the full assembly of the bomb, nor tested it."

The general, a chemistry specialist who studied at the University of London, is the first non-defecting Iraqi official to talk about the country's nuclear programme with relative candour. He insisted, however, that Iraq no longer had nuclear ambitions.

An IAEA spokesmen said yesterday that General Saadi's statement was consistent with what the agency already knew about Iraq's clandestine nuclear programme up to 1998, when the inspectors pulled out of the country.

Washington and London, however, claim to have intelligence indicating that President Saddam's government is reactivating the programme. Tony Blair recently made public satellite photographs which, he maintained, showed the Iraqis were engaged in new construction.

Al-Tuwaitha, a complex sprawling across 50 hectares (120 acres), was the biggest nuclear facility in Iraq and the site of the three Osirak reactors that were bombed by the Israelis in 1981 and the Americans during the Gulf War 10 years later. The plant's main purpose was to produce the fissionable material needed for making nuclear devices.

The Iraqis say the site is now used for making pharmaceutical products and for experiments in growing mushrooms for the food industry. They say no nuclear work has been done there since 1991.

During their first visit to Tuwaitha last week, agency inspectors took away samples from a German-built furnace which, according to the director of the complex, Faiz al-Barkhdar, has been out of use since the mid-Nineties because of a lack of spare parts.

Dr Barkhdar said: "The truth is that even the harmless work we do now is hampered by lack of resources. When the Israelis bombed us, the IAEA said we had co-operated with them in the past. And that has continued. I do not know why they keep coming back to al-Tuwaitha, but they will not find anything, it does not matter how many so-called satellite photographs Tony Blair produces."

The IAEA said the site had been visited "room by room" but that more time was needed to inspect the dozens of buildings that had been monitored by UN arms inspectors before they pulled out in 1998.

The Iraqis vast declaration to the UN is said to include details of how two methods were used to try to obtain a domestic supply of weapons-grade fuel – electromagnetic isotope separation and gas-centrifuge enrichment.