COLUMN ONE : Perils of Search and Destroy : U.N. inspectors face countless dangers as they work to destroy Iraqi weapons. Their mission underscores the need and limitations of international efforts against arms proliferation.

UNITED NATIONS —  Iraq’s Al Muthanna chemical weapons complex, strewn with decaying and leaking munitions amid the rubble from the Persian Gulf War, is, in the words of a United Nations inspector, “the most dangerous place in the world.”

Its hellish image was seared into the minds of the inspectors some weeks ago when an Iraqi bulldozer started to crush 122-millimeter chemical warfare rocket projectiles under their watchful gaze.

The Iraqis had assured them that all the projectiles were empty. But the Iraqis were mistaken. Pierced by the ram of the bulldozer, a projectile exploded, loosing a gush of the deadly nerve gas sarin into the air. The closest inspector, a Dutch army officer, was more than 100 feet away, too far to be harmed. But an Iraqi soldier, standing near the crushed projectile, collapsed, felled by the gas.

Acting swiftly, the Dutch inspector pulled the stricken soldier to a medical clinic on the complex. Iraqi doctors managed to pump enough antidote into the soldier to save his life. But the incident underscores a grim reality:

At least two more years of such precarious work awaits the teams of U.N. inspectors who have the power, under the Security Council resolutions that halted the Gulf War, to swoop into Iraq at will, search out its weapons of mass destruction and obliterate them.

For the last six months, the inspectors have ventured into Iraq 20 times from their staging base in the island nation of Bahrain, rumbling along in Norwegian trucks, flying in German helicopters and transport aircraft, clutching intelligence photographs provided by an American U-2 spy plane.

They have ventured into dangerous, once-secret sites where nerve gas can seep unseen from unmarked drums and where unexploded munitions teeter in the ruins of warehouses.

They have played a tiresome game of wits and nerves with Iraqi officials determined to salvage, through threats and deception, Iraq’s prestige and destructive power from the rubble.

And, making up rules and procedures as they go along, the inspectors have challenged some of the most entrenched beliefs about how the world community can control the spread of weapons of mass destruction throughout the Third World.

For American arms control experts, the experience of the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq has been a lesson in both the potential for and the limitations of international cooperation in curbing the most dangerous arms proliferation. It also has caused a substantial rethinking of what it will take to halt the spread of the world’s most terrifying weapons.

The problem is enormous and fearsome. International inspectors now know they cannot be satisfied with the perfunctory inspections that once were the rule. But only a devastating military defeat forced Iraq to let teams of inspectors poke into the crevices of its most secret installations. How do inspectors mount intense Iraqi-type inspections in a country such as Iran in the future if it resists?

The danger of secret development of nuclear bombs is even more obvious in a country such as North Korea, which, even though it has signed the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, does not allow any inspections, perfunctory or not. To pressure the North Koreans to stop making nuclear weapons, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney announced in Seoul on Thursday that the United States will halt withdrawals of American troops from South Korea “until the dangers and uncertainties of the North Korean nuclear program have been thoroughly addressed.” But this pressure may not be enough.

“If there is a new world order,” said Michael Krepon, director of a multilateral verification project at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, “it’s going to involve multilateral efforts to deal with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. And if it’s going to be successful, we who have these wondrous intelligence-gathering capabilities have to learn to share its products with those who we want and need to help us.”

In their first six months of work, the inspectors have laid bare most of the designs of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s programs of mass destruction:

- The inspectors uncovered the existence of a secret program capable of producing a nuclear bomb in a year to 18 months.

- They inventoried Iraq’s 46,000 missiles, bombs and other munitions filled or ready to be filled with nerve and mustard gas and started preparations to destroy them.

- They concluded that Iraq, although experimenting, did not have actual biological warfare weapons. This conclusion, however, is disputed by U.S. officials.

- They destroyed two “superguns” and concluded that Iraq has still failed to account for 300 Scud missiles. The inspectors are not sure what happened to them, but U.S. officials believe that the Scuds have been hidden by the Iraqis.

Carrying out the mandate of the special commission will be an open-ended commitment that could extend for several years, not for several months, as was widely expected when the commission was established.

That kind of vigilance is crucial in light of one of the inspectors’ most alarming findings: that the know-how to build nuclear weapons, as well as the whole array of terror weapons Iraq has accumulated, “remains firmly in the hands of the Iraqi personnel who directed and carried out this program,” according to David Kay, the special commission’s senior nuclear inspector.

Iraq’s home-grown weapons production capability has become personified by Dr. Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, the mastermind behind Hussein’s aggressive nuclear weapons program. The central role of the British-educated physicist, who has accompanied U.N. inspectors on several of their trips, has emerged in 45,000 pages of documents, including detailed personnel records seized by the U.N. inspectors in September.

That evidence, plus Iraqi intransigence, finally persuaded the Security Council to expand the role of the inspectors. Not only must they seek out Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and destroy them, but they have been charged with continuing their inspections afterward to make sure that Iraq never again resumes these programs.

American officials said that Iraq’s reliance on native talent will require inspectors to follow for years the careers and foreign dealings of these indigenous weapons-makers, as well as the far-flung network of foreign suppliers whose cooperation was indispensable to Iraq’s efforts.

“When we were formed originally, we thought we would dissolve into dew once our work was done” in perhaps six months or so, said Johan Molander, a Swedish diplomat who is the commission spokesman. “But the Security Council has given the commission, if not eternal, at least long-lasting life.”

Members of the teams fear that the inspections, before they are over, also may cost lives.

“In some of the chemical weapons areas, we have not only their munitions, which . . . were decaying and leaking and dangerous by themselves, but we find mixed in unexploded coalition munitions just to brighten the day of the inspectors,” said Robert Gallucci, deputy director of the special commission. “This is a very dicey affair.”

During an inspection by chemical weapons specialists in August, Iraqi officers pointed out to U.N. inspectors a batch of 155-millimeter artillery rounds and told them they were filled with harmless alcohol, not a nerve agent. As the inspectors, unprotected by chemical suits, oversaw the drilling of holes in the munitions to drain them, the Iraqis suddenly had second thoughts: Perhaps four of the munitions, they warned, were filled with the deadly nerve agent sarin.

The inspectors quickly halted the operation before the canisters were opened, and they are now treating all munitions as if they are filled with poison gas.

Deadly chemicals are not the only threat to inspectors’ safety. Highly radioactive components of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, now believed to have put Baghdad within a year of producing a nuclear weapon, have been found buried hurriedly in the open desert, potentially exposing anything within miles to dangerous levels of radioactivity.

“I think they were more worried about the secrecy of the program than about any safety concerns,” said a senior Pentagon official monitoring the inspections.

During a more recent inspection, U.N. experts on biological warfare were given samples of virulently deadly anthrax and botulism toxin by Iraqi officials, who only three months earlier had denied that Iraq had a biological warfare program.

American officials, fearing that the United Nations will give up the hunt for a biological weapons program for lack of evidence, have told The Times they are “quite confident” that Baghdad is hiding a full-fledged biological weapons program. Given the Iraqis’ disregard for safety standards in the past, such a nasty surprise could compound the dangers to inspection teams, officials worry.

“The Iraqis are no fools,” Molander said. “They have very high technical skills. But they certainly do not share our safety philosophy. They have a cavalier attitude toward risks.”

The inspections also have spawned a good deal of frightening tension between the inspectors and Iraqis. In a series of incidents in August and September, Iraqi soldiers fired over the heads of inspectors, seized documents from them and kept a group of inspectors under siege for four days in the parking lot of a nuclear headquarters in Baghdad. The international band of inspectors, however, has tried to laugh off these dangers. They dubbed the now-famous Inspection No. 16 “the Parking Lot Tour” and joked about ordering T-shirts to commemorate the outing.

The U.N. inspectors’ “search-and-destroy” methods are a mixture of high technology and on-the-spot improvisation: Overhead, a multimillion-dollar U-2 spy plane, on loan to the United Nations from the United States, flies high over Iraq at the behest of the inspectors, and U.S. spy satellites gather millions of images and bits of electronic data every day, generating crucial intelligence that is forwarded to the United Nations.

On the ground, however, inspectors have made do with low-tech ingenuity: The Iraqis have been ordered to use acetylene torches, drills and--their preferred method of destruction--bulldozers to dismantle 53 Scud missiles, almost 12,000 unfilled munitions and a pair of superguns the Iraqis denied having until an inspection team arrived in Iraq and began looking for them in early October.

Inspectors also are mulling over a range of low-technology solutions to the difficult and dangerous task of destroying chemical weapons. The Pentagon has spent $240 million to build and equip a sophisticated chemical weapons destruction plant on Johnston Atoll southwest of Hawaii, and even with those precautions, safety concerns were stirred among the public. But the United Nations is considering decidedly cruder destruction methods.

At the Al Muthanna complex, where all of Iraq’s remaining chemical weapons are being consolidated for destruction, inspectors now believe they will probably order munitions containing mustard gas burned in massive furnaces built on the spot. But they are not sure whether to order the burning of the nerve agent sarin or its reduction by hydrolysis, a process never before tried on this kind of mixture. The latter system would decompose the chemical until it turns into a salt. Hydrolysis seems to be the most efficient system, but the salts could be harmful if they were allowed to seep into Iraq’s water table.

Even the perplexing search for Iraq’s remaining ballistic missiles has become an exercise in low-tech methods: U.S. officials and U.N. inspectors suspect the Iraqis of playing hide-and-seek with missiles, and they are using simple arithmetic to try to prove it.

From the 800 Scud missiles originally sold to Iraq by the Soviet Union, some U.S. and U.N. experts believe that as many as 300 Scuds remain, threatening neighbors such as Israel, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. To derive that number--far higher than the 53 missiles reported by Iraq and destroyed so far--inspectors are counting up the Scuds that would have been expended in tests, in the Iran-Iraq and Persian Gulf wars and in efforts to build new longer-range missiles by welding the bodies of several Scuds together.

“In the meantime,” said Derek Boothby, one of the leaders of the ballistic missile inspection team, “we’re looking very energetically and will continue to do so, because we ourselves are not satisfied.”

That search, said American officials, could hinge not only on arithmetic, but on a factor that has been indispensable to the special commission’s efforts: detailed U.S. intelligence. The Bush Administration recently has turned over to the special commission the locations of dozens of facilities, including caves scattered throughout the western desert of Iraq, that may be hiding Scud missiles.

Such tips underline the crucial role that U.S. intelligence has played in the inspectors’ work. Washington has provided “a major portion” of the intelligence the teams worked with, a knowledgeable American official told The Times. It has been, for instance, the only source of satellite intelligence; the Soviets, with hundreds of spy satellites orbiting, have not contributed pictures.

An American official said that it is the U.S. intelligence agencies that, for example, tipped inspectors off to the possibility that a warehouse outside Baghdad might contain vital documents on Iraq’s nuclear program.

“How else do you know where to go for that stuff?” the official asked. “The United Nations certainly didn’t know.”

The CIA, the lead agency coordinating the U.S. relationship with the special commission, has provided not only the locations of caves that may be hiding Scuds but a list of single-cell protein facilities that U.S. officials feel certain were engaged in the production of biological weapons.

Some, such as the Baghdad document warehouse, have yielded spectacular results. Other leads, such as the Al Hakam single-cell protein facility, which ostensibly was to produce massive quantities of bacteria and yeast to be used in animal feed, appear to have run up against a determined Iraqi program of deception and concealment. Karen Jensen, an American inspector on the U.N. team looking for evidence of an Iraqi program of biological weapons, recently described Al Hakam as “a very, very, very strange facility” with bunker-like warehouses on the grounds and no evidence of single-cell protein production.

For the keepers of U.S. intelligence, this new openhandedness has not been altogether easy.

“Of course there’s been a reluctance to share all of it,” one U.S. official said of sensitive U.S. intelligence. “There are times when you don’t give your best information. You’re telling them how to cover up next time.”

At the same time, Washington’s generosity with intelligence has brought major dividends. Inspectors, who have been chosen primarily for their expertise in certain technical areas, may not be trained in espionage. But officials said their access in Iraq beats anything the United States has been able to achieve in recent years, and since they are experts, the intelligence they are gathering is technically better than much of that gathered in secrecy.

“In this case, we’re getting back good samples, good pictures,” a U.S. official said. “They have access to places we seldom get people into. The increase in our knowledge of Iraq’s programs has taken a quantum leap.”

Where the Weapons Are Nuclear Sites: 1. Al Tuwaitha 2. Al Qaim 3. Tarmiyah 4. Ash Sharqat

Chemical Warfare Sites: 5. Al Muthanna 6. Al Fallujah 7. Tammuz Air Base (At Habbaniyah) 8. Al Mahmudiyah

Biological Warfare Site: 9. Salman Pak

“Supergun” Sites: 10. Jabal Hamrin Mountains 11. Al Iskandariyah

Missile Launching Sites: 12. Scattered in Western Iraq