ABSTRACT
During the last two weeks of December 1995, Iraqi scuba divers under direc-tion of the United Nations Special Commission on Disarmament (UNSCOM) went fishing in a canal near Baghdad. As suspected, UNSCOM found more than 200 guidance systems parts taken from dismantled Russian submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SSN-18s).1 UNSCOM obtained this information only after they confronted Iraqi authorities with evidence regarding a load of nearly 240 gyroscopes bound for Iraq and seized in Jordan in November 1995.2
These discoveries and others demonstrated the ongoing Iraqi interest in pursuing a variety of weapons programs in violation of commitments that country made at the end of the Gulf War. While this persistence eventually led to the collapse of the UNSCOM inspection system in 1998, as early as the summer of 1993, reports began to suggest that Iraq had repaired or rebuilt “nearly all” of its military production infrastructure destroyed by UN forces during the war.3
