First, Saddam Hussein has used these horrific weapons on another country and on his own people. In fact, in the history of chemical warfare, no country has had more battlefield experience with chemical weapons since World War I than Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Second, as with biological weapons, Saddam Hussein has never accounted for vast amounts of chemical weaponry: 550 artillery shells with mustard, 30,000 empty munitions, and enough precursors to increase his stockpile to as much as 500 tons of chemical agents. If we consider just one category of missing weaponry, 6,500 bombs from the Iran-Iraq war, UNMOVIC says the amount of chemical agent in them would be in the order of a thousand tons.

These quantities of chemical weapons are now unaccounted for.

Dr. Blix has quipped that, quote, "Mustard gas is not marmalade; you are supposed to know what you did with it." We believe Saddam Hussein knows what he did with it and he has not come clean with the international community. We have evidence these weapons existed.

What we don't have is evidence from Iraq that they have been destroyed or where they are. That is what we are still waiting for.

Third point. Iraq's record on chemical weapons is replete with lies. It took years for Iraq to finally admit that it had produced four tons of the deadly nerve agent, VX. A single drop of VX on the skin will kill in minutes. Four tons. The admission only came out after inspectors collected documentation as a result of the defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's late son-in-law.

UNSCOM also gained forensic evidence that Iraq had produced VX and put it into weapons for delivery. Yet, to this day, Iraq denies it had ever weaponized VX.

And on January 27th, UNMOVIC told this council that it has information that conflicts with the Iraqi account of its VX program.

We know that Iraq has embedded key portions of its illicit chemical weapons infrastructure within its legitimate civilian industry. To all outward appearances, even to experts, the infrastructure looks like an ordinary civilian operation. Illicit and legitimate production can go on simultaneously; or on a dime, this dual-use infrastructure can turn from clandestine to commercial and then back again. These inspections would be unlikely -- any inspections of such facilities would be unlikely to turn up anything prohibited, especially if there is any warning that the inspections are coming. Call it ingenious or evil genius, but the Iraqis deliberately designed their chemical weapons programs to be inspected.

It is infrastructure with a built-in ally.

Under the guise of dual-use infrastructure, Iraq has undertaken an effort to reconstitute facilities that were closely associated with its past program to develop and produce chemical weapons. For example, Iraq has rebuilt key portions of the Tariq state establishment. Tariq includes facilities designed specifically for Iraq's chemical weapons program and employs key figures from past programs.

That's the production end of Saddam's chemical weapons business.

What about the delivery end? I'm going to show you a small part of a chemical complex called Al-Musayyib, a site that Iraq has used for at least three years to transship chemical weapons from production facilities out to the field.

In May 2002, our satellites photographed the unusual activity in this picture. Here we see cargo vehicles are again at this transshipment point, and we can see that they are accompanied by a decontamination vehicle associated with biological or chemical weapons activity. What makes this picture significant is that we have a human source who has corroborated that movement of chemical weapons occurred at this site at that time. So it's not just the photo, and it's not an individual seeing the photo. It's the photo and the knowledge of an individual being brought together to make the case.

This photograph of the site, taken two months later in July, shows not only the previous site -- which is the figure in the middle at the top with the bulldozer sign near it -- it shows that this previous site, as well as all of the other sites around the site, have been fully bulldozed and graded.

The topsoil has been removed. The Iraqis literally removed the crust of the earth from large portions of this site, in order to conceal chemical weapons evidence that would be there from years of chemical weapons activity.

To support its deadly biological and chemical weapons programs, Iraq procures needed items from around the world, using an extensive clandestine network. What we know comes largely from intercepted communications and human sources who are in a position to know the facts.

Iraq's procurement efforts include equipment that can filter and separate microorganisms and toxins involved in biological weapons; equipment that can be used to concentrate the agent; growth media that can be used to continue producing anthrax and botulinum toxin; sterilization equipment for laboratories; glass-lined reactors and specialty pumps that can handle corrosive chemical weapons agents and precursors; large amounts of thionyl chloride, a precursor for nerve and blister agents; and other chemicals, such as sodium sulfide, an important mustard agent precursor.

Now of course Iraq will argue that these items can also be used for legitimate purposes. But if that is true, why did we have to learn about them by intercepting communications and risking the lives of human agents? With Iraq's well-documented history on biological and chemical weapons, why should any of us give Iraq the benefit of the doubt? I don't, and I don't think you will either after you hear this next intercept.

Just a few weeks ago we intercepted communications between two commanders in Iraq's 2nd Republican Guard Corps. One commander is going to be giving an instruction to the other. You will hear, as this unfolds, that what he wants to communicate to the other guy -- wants to make sure the other guy hears clearly, to the point of repeating it, so that it gets written down and completely understood.

Listen.

(Audiotape is played.)

Let's review a few selected items of this conversation. Two officers talking to each other on the radio want to make sure that nothing is misunderstood.

"Remove."

"Remove."

"The expression."

"The expression. I got it."

"Nerve agents."

"Nerve agents."

"Wherever it comes up."

"Got it. Wherever it comes up."

"In the wireless instructions."

"In the instructions."

"Correction. No, in the wireless instructions."

"Wireless. I got it."

Why does he repeat it that way? Why is he so forceful, making sure this is understood, and why did he focus on wireless instructions? Because the senior officer is concerned that somebody might be listening. Well, somebody was. "Nerve agents." "Stop talking about it. They are listening to us. Don't give any evidence that we have these horrible agents." But we know that they do, and this kind of conversation confirms it.

Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent. That is enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan.

Let me remind you that of the 122-millimeter chemical warheads that the U.N. inspectors found recently, this discovery could very well be, as has been noted, the tip of a submerged iceberg. The question before us all, my friends, is, when will we see the rest of the submerged iceberg? Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons. Saddam Hussein has used such weapons. And Saddam Hussein has no compunction about using them again -- against his neighbors and against his own people. And we have sources who tell us that he recently has authorized his field commanders to use them. He wouldn't be passing out the orders if he didn't have the weapons or the intent to use them.

We also have sources who tell us that since the 1980s, Saddam's regime has been experimenting on human beings to perfect its biological or chemical weapons. A source said that 1,600 death-row prisoners were transferred in 1995 to a special unit for such experiments. An eyewitness saw prisoners tied down to beds, experiments conducted on them, blood oozing around the victims' mouths, and autopsies performed to confirm the effects of the prisoners -- on the prisoners. Saddam Hussein's humanity -- inhumanity -- has no limits.

Let me turn now to nuclear weapons. We have no indication that Saddam Hussein has ever abandoned his nuclear-weapons program. On the contrary, we have more than a decade of proof that he remains determined to acquire nuclear weapons.

To fully appreciate the challenge that we face today, remember that in 1991 the inspectors searched Iraq's primary nuclear weapons facilities for the first time and they found nothing to conclude that Iraq had a nuclear-weapons program. But based on defector information, in May of 1991 Saddam Hussein's lie was exposed. In truth, Saddam Hussein had a massive clandestine nuclear-weapons program that covered several different techniques to enrich uranium, including electromagnetic isotope separation, gas centrifuge and gas diffusion.

We estimate that this illicit program cost the Iraqis several billion dollars. Nonetheless, Iraq continued to tell the IAEA that it had no nuclear weapons program. If Saddam had not been stopped, Iraq could have produced a nuclear bomb by 1993, years earlier than most worst-case assessments that have been made before the war.

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