In the days before Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Gulf war, the vast sprawl of anonymous factory buildings that makes up the Badr General Establishment was a central hub in its efforts to design and build a nuclear bomb.
As Iraq has admitted to the United Nations, it was here, 20 miles south of Baghdad, that the bustling teams of technicians and machinists worked on components for the gas centrifuges and molecular pumps that were intended for Iraq's enrichment cascade for the fissile material for its nuclear bomb. It was here too that Iraq's missile technicians worked on modification and production of the Scud B missiles that they hoped would carry a warhead.
With Iraq's capitulation to the allied forces, Badr - like the State Enterprise for Heavy Equipment Engineering and dozens of other enterprises run under the auspices of the Ministry for Military Industrialisation - was supposed to be closed...