Former UNSCOM inspector and intelligence analyst Bill Tierney believes that Saddam Hussein already has nuclear weapons—and he has a suspicion where they might be: Here’s Your Smoking Gun: Iraqi Nukes. (Hat tip: Mystic Monist.)

I have seen enough to convince me that the Iraqis do have nukes, and I know exactly where they enriched the uranium to do so. For some time now, experts have said Iraq is moving towards a nuclear weapon. Secretary of State Powell emphasized Saddam’s intense desire to obtain a nuclear weapon in his presentation before the Security Council.

Just how much time must pass before people are willing to say the Iraqis have arrived? Even the skeptics admit that the lingering obstacle has been accumulating enough enriched uranium for a weapon. Without unambiguous evidence, most commentators are unwilling to make the call that the Iraqis have nukes. As a former inspector and intelligence analyst involved with nominating inspection targets, allow me to lay out my case that the Iraqis have succeeded.

As groundwork, the Iraqis successfully ran a nuclear weapons development program during the eighties and hid it not only from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), but Western intelligence agencies as well. We know and appreciate how skilled they are at concealment.

Shortly after the start of weapons inspections in 1991, the Iraqis went to extraordinary efforts to move uranium enrichment equipment, specifically electro-magnetic isotope separation (EMIS) using calutrons, away from inspectors. I will refer to this as the Kay Inspection, after David Kay, the chief inspector on the ground. The Iraqis claimed to have unilaterally destroyed this equipment, but Khidr Hamza, formerly a nuclear weapons designer, stated in his book “Saddam’s Bombmaker,” that Iraq has the machine tools to easily rebuild this uranium enrichment equipment.

In 1996, during an inspection of Tuwaitha Nuclear Weapon Research Facility, the Iraqis attempted to drive a vehicle past a checkpoint with a document from the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council. This document referred to mysterious coded projects. After we found the document, the Iraqis first tried to wrest it away in a tug of war, then managed to regain the document through another counter-inspection tactic. This is an incredible amount of effort to hide information from UNSCOM. Tuwaitha is the workshop for constructing the bomb.