Khidir Hamza

Khidir Hamza (Arabic: خضر حمزة‎‎) is an Iraqi scientist who worked for Saddam Hussein's nuclear programme in the 1980s and early 1990s. Following the Gulf War, he left Iraq in 1994 and went into exile in the United States. He provided testimony to Western intelligence agencies suggesting that Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programmes were active and ongoing. However, since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, most, if not all of his information on the Nuclear Weapons program have been widely discredited, and former UNSCOM inspectors insist that he was never part of the Nuclear Program at all.

Dr. Hamza first came to the United States in the 1960s, attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after being recommended by Abdul Jabbar Abdullah, a prominent Iraqi scientist and an alumnus of MIT himself. He later attended Florida State University, obtaining a degree in nuclear physics. He intended to stay permanently in America, but following the 1968 coup, Khidir heard about how families of relatives living overseas were arrested and reportedly tortured. Fearing for his parents and threats from Mossad and the PLO for turning down an offer to develop nuclear bombs for the PLO (the person who approached him for the job was allegedly assassinated by the Mossad in 1978 in Paris), he applied for his return.

Upon his return to Iraq in 1970, he began work on nuclear research and nuclear weaponry. He has claimed that he had persuaded Saddam Hussein into starting a nuclear weapons program, brought Iraq in the IAEA, was in charge of the purchase, construction, and operation of the Osirak reactor and the surrounding Baghdad Nuclear Research Facility (better known by its Iraqi name, Al Tuwaithia), by 1981, was in charge of Iraq's nuclear weapons programme (succeeding Hussain al-Shahristani). By the Gulf War he claimed he was able to complete work a stable bomb capable of being used on Israel, although it was too large to fit on a missile (he claimed it was 4 feet in diameter, about the size of Fat Man), and it never had the nuclear core.

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