Salman Yassin Zweir, quoted by the Sunday Times, said the orders came in a secret document issued in August 1998, four months before Saddam Hussein expelled international weapons inspectors from the country.
The new headquarters for the operation, he said, was identified as a research center on Al-Juadriya Street in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. Mehdi Shurq Ghali, head of the research program, signed the order.
"Saddam is very proud of his nuclear team," the newspaper quoted Zweir, who has escaped Iraq to Jordan. "He will never give up the dream of being the first Arab leader to have a nuclear bomb."
The Sunday Times said the 39-year-old design engineer, who worked for 13 years for the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, is to be interviewed by U.S. intelligence agents and officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The IAEA carried out more than 1,000 inspections of sites between 1991 and 1997 in Iraq that they suspected had been and were possibly still being used in connection with development of weapons of mass destruction.
The inspections were ordered following the 1990-1991 Gulf War, sparked by Saddam's invasion and occupation of neighboring Kuwait.
Zweir, who said he was arrested and tortured after refusing to return to nuclear weapons work, said that during the war the Iraqi security service moved weapons development components around to keep them from the reach of allied warplanes. They did the same after the war to keep them from the U.N. inspectors.
Charles Duelfer, the former deputy chief of U.N. inspectors in Iraq, told the newspaper he was "very concerned" after hearing Zweir's story.
"When we were working in Iraq, there was a pattern that appeared to show ongoing [weapons] research, but we never found direct evidence."
The Iraqi nuclear weapons program was called Project 3000 and at one time was under Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law, who was later executed. U.N. inspectors believed Iraq was between one and four years from making a nuclear bomb when the war broke out and research and development facilities were destroyed.
Zweir escaped from Iraq in 1998 and lives in Jordan with his wife and children, the newspaper said.
The report comes as more countries are beginning to break ranks on U.N. sanctions imposed on Iraq following the war and as a result of its non-cooperation with mandated weapons inspections. Iraq has been waging a steady campaign for economic sanctions to be lifted.
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