David Albright and Mark Hibbs

About the Authors: David Albright is a senior scientist at Friends of the Earth, an environmental organization in Washington, D. C. Mark Hibbs is European editor of Nuclear Fuel and Nucleonics Week in Bonn, Germany. The following article was written in March 1991.

Just two hours after U.S. warplanes began attacking Iraq on January 16, 1991, President George Bush went on national television to report the goals of the assault. "As I report to you, air attacks are under way against military targets in Iraq. We are determined to knock out Sad- dam Hussein's nuclear bomb potential," the president said, before ticking off other objectives. The prominence Bush gave to Iraq's nuclear "potential" repeated a theme that the administration began pushing vigorously in November 1990 as a rationale for...