U.N. Inspectors Find Secret Iraqi Center

UNITED NATIONS — The hub of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was a scientific research center, Al Atheer, about 40 miles south of Baghdad, according to a report by Hans Blix, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had planned to design and produce a nuclear bomb at the center, the report said. U.S. and other allied intelligence agencies had failed to identify the plant’s importance, and it was only lightly bombed during the Gulf War.

The report was based on documents brought out of Iraq by the U.N. weapons inspectors led by David Kay, an American, after a three-day standoff in a Baghdad parking lot. Iraq let the inspectors leave with the documents in return for a promise to catalogue them.