UN inspectors are poised to return to Iraq for the first time since the US-led invasion 20 months ago.
A spokesman for the United Nations nuclear watchdog said today that a team is ready to investigate the disappearance after the invasion of equipment that could be used in atomic weapons.
"We are ready, subject to Security Council guidance and the prevailing security situation, to resume our Security Council mandated verification activities in Iraq ," International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) spokesman Mr Mark Gwozdecky said.
The IAEA, which monitored Saddam Hussein's nuclear sites before last year's war, informed the UN Security Council this week that equipment and materials that could be used to make atomic weapons have been moved from Iraq but neither Baghdad nor Washington had noticed.
"This is another screw-up by the US," said Mr David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security think-tank.
"They should have let the IAEA inspectors go in long ago."
Former chief UN weapons inspector Dr Hans Blix, whom Washington had harshly criticised before the Iraq invasion for suggesting Saddam might not have any banned weapons programmes, said the entire Iraq project had ended in "tragedy and failure".
Iraq
He said nothing had gone missing since a looting spree after the invasion in March 2003.
Both countries now admit Saddam had no caches of banned weapons. But a Western diplomat close to the IAEA said Mr Omar's comments did not appear to apply to the sites the IAEA was really worried about - which may belong to Iraq 's defence ministry.
Mr Omar specifically referred to the Iraqi nuclear research complex at Tuwaitha near Baghdad, the one site where the IAEA has conducted limited inspections last year and this year.
"The concerns raised in the [IAEA] letter, centre around material and equipment in dozens of other facilities, most of which are part of the broader complex of former military-related facilities," the diplomat said, on condition of anonymity.
Satellite imagery shows entire buildings in Iraq that once housed high-precision equipment have been dismantled, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said in a letter to the UN Security Council.
The IAEA is afraid this equipment could be sold to a country or terrorist group interested in atomic weapons, diplomats say. Mr Albright, who worked as a UN inspector in Iraq after the first Gulf War, added that the disappearance of facilities in Iraq has not been limited to nuclear sites.
"There was a biological weapons site that vanished as well". He said, the dismantling must have been planned because "some of this equipment is huge, weighing tens of tonnes."
's Science and Technology Minister Rashad Omar said everything at the nuclear sites belonging to his ministry was accounted for and that there had been no recent disappearances.