LONDON, September 16 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Iraq could build a nuclear bomb by the end of the year, according to a dissident Iraqi nuclear scientist quoted by a British newspaper on Monday, September 16.

Khidir Hamza, who helped launch Iraq’s nuclear bomb program before he defected in 1994, claimed President Saddam Hussein’s regime could produce the weapons in the next three months using pirated German equipment and uranium smuggled from Brazil, The Times reported, Agence France-Presse (AFP) said.

“Unless he is stopped soon Saddam will have set up a whole nuclear bomb industry, not just have made a couple of bombs,” Hamza said.

However, Fawzi Hammad, the former head of the Egyptian Nuclear Energy Association told IslamOnline that the Iraqi nuclear capabilities was in fact destroyed during the second Gulf war in 1991.

He said that the IAEA has in the past said that Iraq has no nuclear powers and that it is unable to revive its past powers in the light of the sanctions and the surveillance of Iraqi money. This is why, any talk on Iraq’s nuclear powers needs proof, he said.

Hamza told the paper that even if U.N. inspectors returned to Iraq and were given unrestricted access to suspected weapons sites, it would be difficult to detect bomb-building assembly lines, AFP reported.

“The beauty of the present system is that the units are each very small and in the four years since the inspectors left, they will have been concealed underground or in basements or buildings that outwardly seem normal,” Hamza said.

International pressure is mounting on Iraq to allow the return of weapons inspectors, as the United States continues a campaign to win allied support for a strike aimed at toppling Saddam.

On September 9, the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) charged that Saddam Hussein’s regime is bent on developing weapons of mass destruction and should be stopped.

The international community had a “pressing duty” to respond to the regime and its arsenal, IISS insisted, in the face of mounting resistance from world leaders to U.S. calls for a pre-emptive strike.

A spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) - the U.N. body charged with monitoring Baghdad’s nuclear capabilities - told Dubai-based MBC television channel last week that it had no new evidence about Iraq’s pursuit of nuclear weapons since inspectors pulled out in December 1998.

But IISS director charged Iraq retained the expertise to produce nuclear weapons “within a matter of months” if it succeeded in acquiring plutonium or enriched uranium.

Iraqi officials took reporters on a tour of the site of the Tammuz (Osirak) nuclear reactor bombed out by Israel in 1981 in a bid to disprove the charges.

Foreign ministry official Said Hassan al-Mussawi showed reporters several new buildings at the site just outside Baghdad which he said housed a pharmaceuticals factory, a mushroom farm, and architecture and environmental research offices.

All were used in “strictly civilian pursuits for humanitarian or economic purposes,” he insisted.

The Baghdad press predicted that the U.S. and British leaders would “intensify their media blitz” about Iraq’s alleged weapons programs in the coming days in a bid to justify military action.

On September 10, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, in an interview with the Egyptian daily newspaper Al-Ahram, accused the United States of "closing the doors" on all attempts to find a peaceful solution to the weapons stand-off.