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AMMAN-He was Saddam Hussein's chief nuclear bomb maker, but he never managed to make a bomb. Now he's living in self-imposed exile in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, working as general manager of a company that's bidding tor contracts to help rebuild Iraq. Jafar Dhia Jafar still commands respect from his peers despite the fact that he was a former key adviser to Saddam Hussein. That much was evident last week when they met him at a conference here on Iraqi science.The urbane 63-year-old high-energy physicist also impresses Western experts who worry that his knowledge of nuclear weaponry may appeal to Iran or other countries suspected of pursuing nuclear arsenals. "Jafar is one of the great senior statesmen of Iraqi science," says Alex Dehgan, who ran the Coalition Provisional Authority's program for former weapons scientists.
Jafar holds strong views on the reconstruction of postwar Iraq and the plight of his colleagues there, arguing that Iraqis must take the lead in restoring the nation's infrastructure (see main text). In a wide-ranging conversation with Science, Jafar revealed how close Iraq was to developing a nuclear bomb and discussed the future of science in his shattered homeland.
The making of a weaponeer
Jafar grew up in Baghdad and attended university in the United Kingdom, where in 1965 received a Ph.D. in high-energy physics from the University of Birmingham. He was a member of the team that did the first experiments on NIMROD, a 7-GeV proton synchrotron at the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory in Oxfordshire.
He returned to Iraq in 1966 to take a position at the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission. At the time the Soviets were building a 2-MW thermal research reactor at the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center for medical and basic science projects. Jafar headed the physics and reactor departments there but returned to Europe in July 1970 for a stint at Imperial College London and 5 years at the European laboratory for particle physics (CERN) near Geneva. David Websdale, a physicist at Imperial College London, worked with Jafar at CERN and recalls being impressed with a prototype detector for K+ mesons Jafar designed. Jafar was respected "as a talented physicist," says Websdale, who last had contact with him in the late 1970s. And Jafar was a "popular...