The bomb in my garden : the secret of Saddam's nuclear mastermind / by Mahdi Obeidi and Kurt Pitzer.

Includes index.

The bomb in my garden -- Early ambitions -- The centrifuge -- Saddam's grip -- Shopping in Europe -- The crash program -- Nuclear hide and seek -- The dark years -- The march to war -- The time capsule.

No one knows more about Iraq's nuclear weapons program than Mahdi Obeidi, the man who headed its successful uranium enrichment effort. In the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War, he voluntarily turned himself into American intelligence. Among the revelations reported by CNN at the time: In the early 1990s, under orders to hide the core of the program from U.N. weapons inspectors, Obeidi had buried in his backyard the capacity to build uranium-enriching gas centrifuges. He goes inside Saddam's regime and reveals the truth about its quest for nuclear weapons. He explains how he traveled abroad incognito though the United States and Europe in the 1980s and gained covert assistance for the Iraqi nuclear effort from scientists and manufacturers. He tells how he was forced to orchestrate Saddam's cat-and-mouse game with U.N. weapons inspectors in the early 1990s. And he captures what life was like in Saddam's inner circle: the intimidation, the paranoia, the impossible deadlines. Most significantly, he discloses that Iraq never reconstituted its nuclear weapons program after the first Gulf War. The critical elements, including the centrifuge, remained buried in his garden until he voluntarily turned them over to U.S. forces. Written with the pace and drama of a spy thriller, this book shows how easy it was for a rogue regime to acquire nuclear technology and helps answer still-lingering questions about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.