New York Times
November 3, 2006
Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a
vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush
administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who
had said they hoped to "leverage the Internet" to find new evidence
of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons
experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq's
secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The
documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an
atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York
Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control
officials. A spokesman for John Negroponte, the director of national
intelligence, said access to the site had been suspended "pending a
review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing."

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the
information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had
privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency,
according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity
because of the issue's sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency's
technical experts "were shocked" at the public disclosures.

Early this morning, a spokesman for Gregory L. Schulte, the American
ambassador, denied that anyone from the agency had approached Mr.
Schulte about the Web site.

But former White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. said today
that senior officials had been cautioned against posting the
information.

"John Negroponte warned us that we don't know what's in these
documents, so these are being put out at some risk, and that was a
warning that he put out right when they first released the
documents," Mr. Card said on NBC's "Today" show, according to
The Associated Press.

The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams,
equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear
experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere
on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers
give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and
triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.

"For the U.S. to toss a match into this flammable area is very
irresponsible," said A. Bryan Siebert, a former director of
classification at the federal Department of Energy, which runs the
nation's nuclear arms program. "There's a lot of things about
nuclear weapons that are secret and should remain so."

The government had received earlier warnings about the contents of the
Web site. Last spring, after the site began posting old Iraqi documents
about chemical weapons, United Nations arms-control officials in New
York won the withdrawal of a report that gave information on how to
make tabun and sarin, nerve agents that kill by causing respiratory
failure.

The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative
publications and politicians, who said that the nation's spy agencies
had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized
since the March 2003 invasion. With the public increasingly skeptical
about the rationale and conduct of the war, the chairmen of the House
and Senate intelligence committees argued that wide analysis and
translation of the documents - most of them in Arabic - would
reinvigorate the search for clues that Mr. Hussein had resumed his
unconventional arms programs in the years before the invasion. American
search teams never found such evidence.

Mr. Negroponte had resisted setting up the Web site, which some
intelligence officials felt implicitly raised questions about the
competence and judgment of government analysts. But President Bush
approved the site's creation after Congressional Republicans proposed
legislation to force the documents' release.

In his statement last night, Mr. Negroponte's spokesman, Chad Kolton,
said, "While strict criteria had already been established to govern
posted documents, the material currently on the Web site, as well as
the procedures used to post new documents, will be carefully reviewed
before the site becomes available again."

A spokesman for the National Security Council, Gordon D. Johndroe,
said, "We're confident the D.N.I. is taking the appropriate steps
to maintain the balance between public information and national
security."

The Web site, "Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal," was a
constantly expanding portrait of prewar Iraq. Its many thousands of
documents included everything from a collection of religious and
nationalistic poetry to instructions for the repair of parachutes to
handwritten notes from Mr. Hussein's intelligence service. It became
a popular quarry for a legion of bloggers, translators and amateur
historians.

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in
the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making
sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the
Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein's
scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a
year away.

European diplomats said this week that some of those nuclear documents
on the Web site were identical to the ones presented to the United
Nations Security Council in late 2002, as America got ready to invade
Iraq. But unlike those on the Web site, the papers given to the
Security Council had been extensively edited, to remove sensitive
information on unconventional arms.

The deletions, the diplomats said, had been done in consultation with
the United States and other nuclear-weapons nations. Mohamed ElBaradei,
the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which ran the
nuclear part of the inspections, told the Security Council in late 2002
that the deletions were "consistent with the principle that
proliferation-sensitive information should not be released."

In Europe, a senior diplomat said atomic experts there had studied the
nuclear documents on the Web site and judged their public release as
potentially dangerous. "It's a cookbook," said the diplomat, who
spoke on condition of anonymity because of his agency's rules. "If
you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things."

The New York Times had examined dozens of the documents and asked a
half dozen nuclear experts to evaluate some of them.

Peter D. Zimmerman, a physicist and former United States government
arms scientist now at the war studies department of King's College,
London, called the posted material "very sensitive, much of it
undoubtedly secret restricted data."

Ray E. Kidder, a senior nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory in California, an arms design center, said "some
things in these documents would be helpful" to nations aspiring to
develop nuclear weapons and should have remained secret.

A senior American intelligence official who deals routinely with atomic
issues said the documents showed "where the Iraqis failed and how to
get around the failures." The documents, he added, could perhaps help
Iran or other nations making a serious effort to develop nuclear arms,
but probably not terrorists or poorly equipped states. The official,
who requested anonymity because of his agency's rules against public
comment, called the papers "a road map that helps you get from point
A to point B, but only if you already have a car."

Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a private
group at George Washington University that tracks federal secrecy
decisions, said the impetus for the Web site's creation came from an
array of sources - private conservative groups, Congressional
Republicans and some figures in the Bush administration - who clung
to the belief that close examination of the captured documents would
show that Mr. Hussein's government had clandestinely reconstituted an
unconventional arms programs.

"There were hundreds of people who said, 'There's got to be gold
in them thar hills,' " Mr. Blanton said.

The campaign for the Web site was led by the chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan. Last
November, he and his Senate counterpart, Pat Roberts of Kansas, wrote
to Mr. Negroponte, asking him to post the Iraqi material. The sheer
volume of the documents, they argued, had overwhelmed the intelligence
community.

Some intelligence officials feared that individual documents,
translated and interpreted by amateurs, would be used out of context to
second-guess the intelligence agencies' view that Mr. Hussein did not
have unconventional weapons or substantive ties to Al Qaeda. Reviewing
the documents for release would add an unnecessary burden on busy
intelligence analysts, they argued.

On March 16, after the documents' release was approved, Mr.
Negroponte's office issued a terse public announcement including a
disclaimer that remained on the Web site: "The U.S. government has
made no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents,
validity or factual accuracy of the information contained therein, or
the quality of any translations, when available."

On April 18, about a month after the first documents were made public,
Mr. Hoekstra issued a news release acknowledging "minimal risks,"
but saying the site "will enable us to better understand information
such as Saddam's links to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and
violence against the Iraqi people." He added: "It will allow us to
leverage the Internet to enable a mass examination as opposed to
limiting it to a few exclusive elites."

Yesterday, before the site was shut down, Jamal Ware, a spokesman for
Mr. Hoekstra, said the government had "developed a sound process to
review the documents to ensure sensitive or dangerous information is
not posted." Later, he said the complaints about the site "didn't
sound like a big deal," adding, "We were a little surprised when
they pulled the plug."

The precise review process that led to the posting of the nuclear and
chemical-weapons documents is unclear. But in testimony before Congress
last spring, a senior official from Mr. Negroponte's office, Daniel
Butler, described a "triage" system used to sort out material that
should remain classified. Even so, he said, the policy was to "be
biased towards release if at all possible." Government officials say
all the documents in Arabic have received at least a quick review by
Arabic linguists.

Some of the first posted documents dealt with Iraq's program to make
germ weapons, followed by a wave of papers on chemical arms.

At the United Nations in New York, the chemical papers raised alarms at
the Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which had been
in charge of searching Iraq for all unconventional arms, save the
nuclear ones.

In April, diplomats said, the commission's acting chief weapons
inspector, Demetrius Perricos, lodged an objection with the United
States mission to the United Nations over the document that dealt with
the nerve agents tabun and sarin.

Soon, the document vanished from the Web site. On June 8, diplomats
said, Mr. Perricos told the Security Council of how risky arms
information had shown up on a public Web site and how his agency
appreciated the American cooperation in resolving the matter.

In September, the Web site began posting the nuclear documents, and
some soon raised concerns. On Sept. 12, it posted a document it called
"Progress of Iraqi nuclear program circa 1995." That description is
potentially misleading since the research occurred years earlier.

The Iraqi document is marked "Draft FFCD Version 3 (20.12.95),"
meaning it was preparatory for the "Full, Final, Complete
Disclosure" that Iraq made to United Nations inspectors in March
1996. The document carries three diagrams showing cross sections of
bomb cores, and their diameters.

On Sept. 20, the site posted a much larger document, "Summary of
technical achievements of Iraq's former nuclear program." It runs
to 51 pages, 18 focusing on the development of Iraq's bomb design.
Topics included physical theory, the atomic core and high-explosive
experiments. By early October, diplomats and officials said, United
Nations arms inspectors in New York and their counterparts in Vienna
were alarmed and discussing what to do.

Last week in Vienna, Olli J. Heinonen, head of safeguards at the
international atomic agency, expressed concern about the documents to
Mr. Schulte, diplomats said.

Scott Shane and John O'Neil contributed reporting.

New York Times
November 3, 2006
Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

New York Times
November 3, 2006
Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer
But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons
experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq's
secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The
documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an
atom bomb.

A spokesman for John Negroponte, the director of national
intelligence, said access to the site had been suspended "pending a
review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing."

New York Times
November 3, 2006
Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a
vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war.

New York Times
November 3, 2006
Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a
vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush
administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who
had said they hoped to "leverage the Internet" to find new evidence
of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons
experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq's
secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The
documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an
atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York
Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control
officials. A spokesman for John Negroponte, the director of national
intelligence, said access to the site had been suspended "pending a
review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing."

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the
information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had
privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency,
according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity
because of the issue's sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency's
technical experts "were shocked" at the public disclosures.

Early this morning, a spokesman for Gregory L. Schulte, the American
ambassador, denied that anyone from the agency had approached Mr.
Schulte about the Web site.

But former White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. said today
that senior officials had been cautioned against posting the
information.

"John Negroponte warned us that we don't know what's in these
documents, so these are being put out at some risk, and that was a
warning that he put out right when they first released the
documents," Mr. Card said on NBC's "Today" show, according to
The Associated Press.

The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams,
equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear
experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere
on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers
give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and
triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.

"For the U.S. to toss a match into this flammable area is very
irresponsible," said A. Bryan Siebert, a former director of
classification at the federal Department of Energy, which runs the
nation's nuclear arms program. "There's a lot of things about
nuclear weapons that are secret and should remain so."

The government had received earlier warnings about the contents of the
Web site. Last spring, after the site began posting old Iraqi documents
about chemical weapons, United Nations arms-control officials in New
York won the withdrawal of a report that gave information on how to
make tabun and sarin, nerve agents that kill by causing respiratory
failure.

The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative
publications and politicians, who said that the nation's spy agencies
had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized
since the March 2003 invasion. With the public increasingly skeptical
about the rationale and conduct of the war, the chairmen of the House
and Senate intelligence committees argued that wide analysis and
translation of the documents - most of them in Arabic - would
reinvigorate the search for clues that Mr. Hussein had resumed his
unconventional arms programs in the years before the invasion. American
search teams never found such evidence.

Mr. Negroponte had resisted setting up the Web site, which some
intelligence officials felt implicitly raised questions about the
competence and judgment of government analysts. But President Bush
approved the site's creation after Congressional Republicans proposed
legislation to force the documents' release.

In his statement last night, Mr. Negroponte's spokesman, Chad Kolton,
said, "While strict criteria had already been established to govern
posted documents, the material currently on the Web site, as well as
the procedures used to post new documents, will be carefully reviewed
before the site becomes available again."

A spokesman for the National Security Council, Gordon D. Johndroe,
said, "We're confident the D.N.I. is taking the appropriate steps
to maintain the balance between public information and national
security."

The Web site, "Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal," was a
constantly expanding portrait of prewar Iraq. Its many thousands of
documents included everything from a collection of religious and
nationalistic poetry to instructions for the repair of parachutes to
handwritten notes from Mr. Hussein's intelligence service. It became
a popular quarry for a legion of bloggers, translators and amateur
historians.

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in
the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making
sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the
Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein's
scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a
year away.

European diplomats said this week that some of those nuclear documents
on the Web site were identical to the ones presented to the United
Nations Security Council in late 2002, as America got ready to invade
Iraq. But unlike those on the Web site, the papers given to the
Security Council had been extensively edited, to remove sensitive
information on unconventional arms.

The deletions, the diplomats said, had been done in consultation with
the United States and other nuclear-weapons nations. Mohamed ElBaradei,
the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which ran the
nuclear part of the inspections, told the Security Council in late 2002
that the deletions were "consistent with the principle that
proliferation-sensitive information should not be released."

In Europe, a senior diplomat said atomic experts there had studied the
nuclear documents on the Web site and judged their public release as
potentially dangerous. "It's a cookbook," said the diplomat, who
spoke on condition of anonymity because of his agency's rules. "If
you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things."

The New York Times had examined dozens of the documents and asked a
half dozen nuclear experts to evaluate some of them.

Peter D. Zimmerman, a physicist and former United States government
arms scientist now at the war studies department of King's College,
London, called the posted material "very sensitive, much of it
undoubtedly secret restricted data."

Ray E. Kidder, a senior nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory in California, an arms design center, said "some
things in these documents would be helpful" to nations aspiring to
develop nuclear weapons and should have remained secret.

A senior American intelligence official who deals routinely with atomic
issues said the documents showed "where the Iraqis failed and how to
get around the failures." The documents, he added, could perhaps help
Iran or other nations making a serious effort to develop nuclear arms,
but probably not terrorists or poorly equipped states. The official,
who requested anonymity because of his agency's rules against public
comment, called the papers "a road map that helps you get from point
A to point B, but only if you already have a car."

Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a private
group at George Washington University that tracks federal secrecy
decisions, said the impetus for the Web site's creation came from an
array of sources - private conservative groups, Congressional
Republicans and some figures in the Bush administration - who clung
to the belief that close examination of the captured documents would
show that Mr. Hussein's government had clandestinely reconstituted an
unconventional arms programs.

"There were hundreds of people who said, 'There's got to be gold
in them thar hills,' " Mr. Blanton said.

The campaign for the Web site was led by the chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan. Last
November, he and his Senate counterpart, Pat Roberts of Kansas, wrote
to Mr. Negroponte, asking him to post the Iraqi material. The sheer
volume of the documents, they argued, had overwhelmed the intelligence
community.

Some intelligence officials feared that individual documents,
translated and interpreted by amateurs, would be used out of context to
second-guess the intelligence agencies' view that Mr. Hussein did not
have unconventional weapons or substantive ties to Al Qaeda. Reviewing
the documents for release would add an unnecessary burden on busy
intelligence analysts, they argued.

On March 16, after the documents' release was approved, Mr.
Negroponte's office issued a terse public announcement including a
disclaimer that remained on the Web site: "The U.S. government has
made no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents,
validity or factual accuracy of the information contained therein, or
the quality of any translations, when available."

On April 18, about a month after the first documents were made public,
Mr. Hoekstra issued a news release acknowledging "minimal risks,"
but saying the site "will enable us to better understand information
such as Saddam's links to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and
violence against the Iraqi people." He added: "It will allow us to
leverage the Internet to enable a mass examination as opposed to
limiting it to a few exclusive elites."

Yesterday, before the site was shut down, Jamal Ware, a spokesman for
Mr. Hoekstra, said the government had "developed a sound process to
review the documents to ensure sensitive or dangerous information is
not posted." Later, he said the complaints about the site "didn't
sound like a big deal," adding, "We were a little surprised when
they pulled the plug."

The precise review process that led to the posting of the nuclear and
chemical-weapons documents is unclear. But in testimony before Congress
last spring, a senior official from Mr. Negroponte's office, Daniel
Butler, described a "triage" system used to sort out material that
should remain classified. Even so, he said, the policy was to "be
biased towards release if at all possible." Government officials say
all the documents in Arabic have received at least a quick review by
Arabic linguists.

Some of the first posted documents dealt with Iraq's program to make
germ weapons, followed by a wave of papers on chemical arms.

At the United Nations in New York, the chemical papers raised alarms at
the Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which had been
in charge of searching Iraq for all unconventional arms, save the
nuclear ones.

In April, diplomats said, the commission's acting chief weapons
inspector, Demetrius Perricos, lodged an objection with the United
States mission to the United Nations over the document that dealt with
the nerve agents tabun and sarin.

Soon, the document vanished from the Web site. On June 8, diplomats
said, Mr. Perricos told the Security Council of how risky arms
information had shown up on a public Web site and how his agency
appreciated the American cooperation in resolving the matter.

In September, the Web site began posting the nuclear documents, and
some soon raised concerns. On Sept. 12, it posted a document it called
"Progress of Iraqi nuclear program circa 1995." That description is
potentially misleading since the research occurred years earlier.

The Iraqi document is marked "Draft FFCD Version 3 (20.12.95),"
meaning it was preparatory for the "Full, Final, Complete
Disclosure" that Iraq made to United Nations inspectors in March
1996. The document carries three diagrams showing cross sections of
bomb cores, and their diameters.

On Sept. 20, the site posted a much larger document, "Summary of
technical achievements of Iraq's former nuclear program." It runs
to 51 pages, 18 focusing on the development of Iraq's bomb design.
Topics included physical theory, the atomic core and high-explosive
experiments. By early October, diplomats and officials said, United
Nations arms inspectors in New York and their counterparts in Vienna
were alarmed and discussing what to do.

Last week in Vienna, Olli J. Heinonen, head of safeguards at the
international atomic agency, expressed concern about the documents to
Mr. Schulte, diplomats said.

Scott Shane and John O'Neil contributed reporting.

New York Times
November 3, 2006
Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a
vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush
administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who
had said they hoped to "leverage the Internet" to find new evidence
of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons
experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq's
secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The
documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an
atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York
Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control
officials. A spokesman for John Negroponte, the director of national
intelligence, said access to the site had been suspended "pending a
review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing."

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the
information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had
privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency,
according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity
because of the issue's sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency's
technical experts "were shocked" at the public disclosures.

Early this morning, a spokesman for Gregory L. Schulte, the American
ambassador, denied that anyone from the agency had approached Mr.
Schulte about the Web site.

But former White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. said today
that senior officials had been cautioned against posting the
information.

"John Negroponte warned us that we don't know what's in these
documents, so these are being put out at some risk, and that was a
warning that he put out right when they first released the
documents," Mr. Card said on NBC's "Today" show, according to
The Associated Press.

The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams,
equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear
experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere
on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers
give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and
triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.

"For the U.S. to toss a match into this flammable area is very
irresponsible," said A. Bryan Siebert, a former director of
classification at the federal Department of Energy, which runs the
nation's nuclear arms program. "There's a lot of things about
nuclear weapons that are secret and should remain so."

The government had received earlier warnings about the contents of the
Web site. Last spring, after the site began posting old Iraqi documents
about chemical weapons, United Nations arms-control officials in New
York won the withdrawal of a report that gave information on how to
make tabun and sarin, nerve agents that kill by causing respiratory
failure.

The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative
publications and politicians, who said that the nation's spy agencies
had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized
since the March 2003 invasion. With the public increasingly skeptical
about the rationale and conduct of the war, the chairmen of the House
and Senate intelligence committees argued that wide analysis and
translation of the documents - most of them in Arabic - would
reinvigorate the search for clues that Mr. Hussein had resumed his
unconventional arms programs in the years before the invasion. American
search teams never found such evidence.

Mr. Negroponte had resisted setting up the Web site, which some
intelligence officials felt implicitly raised questions about the
competence and judgment of government analysts. But President Bush
approved the site's creation after Congressional Republicans proposed
legislation to force the documents' release.

In his statement last night, Mr. Negroponte's spokesman, Chad Kolton,
said, "While strict criteria had already been established to govern
posted documents, the material currently on the Web site, as well as
the procedures used to post new documents, will be carefully reviewed
before the site becomes available again."

A spokesman for the National Security Council, Gordon D. Johndroe,
said, "We're confident the D.N.I. is taking the appropriate steps
to maintain the balance between public information and national
security."

The Web site, "Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal," was a
constantly expanding portrait of prewar Iraq. Its many thousands of
documents included everything from a collection of religious and
nationalistic poetry to instructions for the repair of parachutes to
handwritten notes from Mr. Hussein's intelligence service. It became
a popular quarry for a legion of bloggers, translators and amateur
historians.

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in
the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making
sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the
Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein's
scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a
year away.

European diplomats said this week that some of those nuclear documents
on the Web site were identical to the ones presented to the United
Nations Security Council in late 2002, as America got ready to invade
Iraq. But unlike those on the Web site, the papers given to the
Security Council had been extensively edited, to remove sensitive
information on unconventional arms.

The deletions, the diplomats said, had been done in consultation with
the United States and other nuclear-weapons nations. Mohamed ElBaradei,
the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which ran the
nuclear part of the inspections, told the Security Council in late 2002
that the deletions were "consistent with the principle that
proliferation-sensitive information should not be released."

In Europe, a senior diplomat said atomic experts there had studied the
nuclear documents on the Web site and judged their public release as
potentially dangerous. "It's a cookbook," said the diplomat, who
spoke on condition of anonymity because of his agency's rules. "If
you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things."

The New York Times had examined dozens of the documents and asked a
half dozen nuclear experts to evaluate some of them.

Peter D. Zimmerman, a physicist and former United States government
arms scientist now at the war studies department of King's College,
London, called the posted material "very sensitive, much of it
undoubtedly secret restricted data."

Ray E. Kidder, a senior nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory in California, an arms design center, said "some
things in these documents would be helpful" to nations aspiring to
develop nuclear weapons and should have remained secret.

A senior American intelligence official who deals routinely with atomic
issues said the documents showed "where the Iraqis failed and how to
get around the failures." The documents, he added, could perhaps help
Iran or other nations making a serious effort to develop nuclear arms,
but probably not terrorists or poorly equipped states. The official,
who requested anonymity because of his agency's rules against public
comment, called the papers "a road map that helps you get from point
A to point B, but only if you already have a car."

Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a private
group at George Washington University that tracks federal secrecy
decisions, said the impetus for the Web site's creation came from an
array of sources - private conservative groups, Congressional
Republicans and some figures in the Bush administration - who clung
to the belief that close examination of the captured documents would
show that Mr. Hussein's government had clandestinely reconstituted an
unconventional arms programs.

"There were hundreds of people who said, 'There's got to be gold
in them thar hills,' " Mr. Blanton said.

The campaign for the Web site was led by the chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan. Last
November, he and his Senate counterpart, Pat Roberts of Kansas, wrote
to Mr. Negroponte, asking him to post the Iraqi material. The sheer
volume of the documents, they argued, had overwhelmed the intelligence
community.

Some intelligence officials feared that individual documents,
translated and interpreted by amateurs, would be used out of context to
second-guess the intelligence agencies' view that Mr. Hussein did not
have unconventional weapons or substantive ties to Al Qaeda. Reviewing
the documents for release would add an unnecessary burden on busy
intelligence analysts, they argued.

On March 16, after the documents' release was approved, Mr.
Negroponte's office issued a terse public announcement including a
disclaimer that remained on the Web site: "The U.S. government has
made no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents,
validity or factual accuracy of the information contained therein, or
the quality of any translations, when available."

On April 18, about a month after the first documents were made public,
Mr. Hoekstra issued a news release acknowledging "minimal risks,"
but saying the site "will enable us to better understand information
such as Saddam's links to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and
violence against the Iraqi people." He added: "It will allow us to
leverage the Internet to enable a mass examination as opposed to
limiting it to a few exclusive elites."

Yesterday, before the site was shut down, Jamal Ware, a spokesman for
Mr. Hoekstra, said the government had "developed a sound process to
review the documents to ensure sensitive or dangerous information is
not posted." Later, he said the complaints about the site "didn't
sound like a big deal," adding, "We were a little surprised when
they pulled the plug."

The precise review process that led to the posting of the nuclear and
chemical-weapons documents is unclear. But in testimony before Congress
last spring, a senior official from Mr. Negroponte's office, Daniel
Butler, described a "triage" system used to sort out material that
should remain classified. Even so, he said, the policy was to "be
biased towards release if at all possible." Government officials say
all the documents in Arabic have received at least a quick review by
Arabic linguists.

Some of the first posted documents dealt with Iraq's program to make
germ weapons, followed by a wave of papers on chemical arms.

At the United Nations in New York, the chemical papers raised alarms at
the Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which had been
in charge of searching Iraq for all unconventional arms, save the
nuclear ones.

In April, diplomats said, the commission's acting chief weapons
inspector, Demetrius Perricos, lodged an objection with the United
States mission to the United Nations over the document that dealt with
the nerve agents tabun and sarin.

Soon, the document vanished from the Web site. On June 8, diplomats
said, Mr. Perricos told the Security Council of how risky arms
information had shown up on a public Web site and how his agency
appreciated the American cooperation in resolving the matter.

In September, the Web site began posting the nuclear documents, and
some soon raised concerns. On Sept. 12, it posted a document it called
"Progress of Iraqi nuclear program circa 1995." That description is
potentially misleading since the research occurred years earlier.

The Iraqi document is marked "Draft FFCD Version 3 (20.12.95),"
meaning it was preparatory for the "Full, Final, Complete
Disclosure" that Iraq made to United Nations inspectors in March
1996. The document carries three diagrams showing cross sections of
bomb cores, and their diameters.

On Sept. 20, the site posted a much larger document, "Summary of
technical achievements of Iraq's former nuclear program." It runs
to 51 pages, 18 focusing on the development of Iraq's bomb design.
Topics included physical theory, the atomic core and high-explosive
experiments. By early October, diplomats and officials said, United
Nations arms inspectors in New York and their counterparts in Vienna
were alarmed and discussing what to do.

Last week in Vienna, Olli J. Heinonen, head of safeguards at the
international atomic agency, expressed concern about the documents to
Mr. Schulte, diplomats said.

Scott Shane and John O'Neil contributed reporting.