VIENNA: In the high-stakes game of political chess under way over the US and UN showdown with Iraq, the next move belongs to the scientists.

On Monday and Tuesday, in a austere high-rise building here, Iraqi officials will meet with chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix and Mohammed Baradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, to discuss the return of first monitors by as early as Oct. 15.

Once they hit the ground, the key to a productive arms monitoring programme in Iraq, say past and present inspectors, will be a simple sounding phrase: free and unfettered access.

“You can’t do effective inspection without access, you have to have the right to go anywhere, any time,” said Garry Dillon, who led the IAEA’s Iraq inspection team from 1997 to 1999. “If that right is denied, you can’t do your job.”

It also means access to Iraqi researchers, government officials and documents to figure out how far along the Persian Gulf nation might be in designing and building weapons. Valuable information often comes from face-to-face interviews with scientists.

Without that human intelligence, say former and present inspectors, the international monitors’ technical expertise, laboratory analysis and more sophisticated technology are useless. Next week’s meeting here at the IAEA’s headquarters, while cloaked in the neutral language of diplomacy and technicalities, will be the first real indicator of Iraq’s intentions. If the meetings go well, it could bolster those who argue for delaying military action until the arms inspectors have a chance to do their job.

“What people will be looking for is signs of real cooperation,” said a UN official.

There is little question that Saddam’s regime would try to hide at least some, if not all, of any weapons programme it has managed to rebuild. Knowing that, the inspectors say they have tried to map out a targeted plan that would allow them to determine if and when the Iraqis are lying to them and to what degree.

“We are going in well-prepared, with a plan, and we never take anything at face value,” said Jacques Baute, the Iraq Action Team leader for the IAEA. “We are thorough and suspicious. We expect that the Iraqis have learned lessons from the 1990s and will do things differently. But we will try a few new things as well,” he said.

That said, how do the arms inspectors proceed, what limitations do they face and how successful can they be at finding well-hidden programmes?

The last time inspectors were in Iraq, they believe they uncovered and destroyed much of the country’s nuclear weapons programme but were less successful at uncovering its biological and chemical weapons stores and labs.

Interviews with people familiar with the inspection programmes acknowledge that there are particularly daunting obstacles in the biological and chemical fields.

If the inspectors return, there will be two teams. The IAEA includes 15 scientists with expertise in all aspects of nuclear weapon production. The United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, or UNMOVIC, is responsible for disarming Iraq of any chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles with ranges of more than 93 miles.

The two teams coordinate their activities. However, their ability to locate weapons varies widely. Nuclear material leaves what scientists call a “footprint” that can be picked up with the increasingly sensitive equipment available for measuring radioactive substances. Samples of air and water often carry telltale signs. Vegetation and soil can be sampled.

New X-ray systems for identifying the presence of metals that are characteristic of nuclear substances are now portable. That means inspectors can do analyses in the field and make decisions quickly about whether more thorough follow-up inspections are necessary, said officials at the IAEA. The chemical and biological lab technology similarly has been miniaturized so that much of it is portable, but biological agents and chemical weapons leave little in the way of footprints.—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times