SEIBERSDORF (Austria): Valery Maiorov points to the little red lines on the screen as he pores over computer graphs that may reveal whether Saddam Hussein is still trying secretly to build a nuclear bomb.

“No uranium here,” mutters the St Petersburg physicist. He has agreed to sacrifice his Christmas holiday because of the race to analyse samples just taken in Iraq by teams of United Nations weapons inspectors and brought to this UN laboratory in the flat, snow-dusted countryside near Austria’s eastern border with Hungary.

Beside the scientist sits a large glass-topped steel triangle with a little square of grubby cotton cloth stretched under its surface. The four-inch (10cm) square of cloth arrived here last week in a sealed plastic bag after being wiped on a surface somewhere suspect in Iraq.

It has been taken to the Seibersdorf laboratory along with a further nine samples from Iraq for crucial, high-priority testing which may determine whether Iraq’s clandestine nuclear programme, said to have been abandoned in 1990, has been resumed.

The ten-strong international team of scientists putting the samples through state-of-the-art x-ray fluorescence machines, electron microscopes and gamma spectrometers are under intense pressure.

“Do we realize that this could start a war?” asks David Donohue, the American scientist who heads the “clean laboratory” set up by the Vienna-based IAEA as a result of the Gulf war a decade ago.

The 10 samples that have been rushed from Iraq to Seibersdorf contain crucial information that could either damn Saddam Hussein to the full might of US forces gathering in the Gulf, or give the Iraqi dictator an extended purchase on power.

But while the world waits to hear the results of the dedicated work of the Seibersdorf scientists, the bigger question is whether their efforts will count for much as the lethal showdown between Washington and Baghdad heads towards a climax.

The mood among the staff at IAEA headquarters in Vienna is one of resignation and frustration as they watch their work being belittled and obstructed constantly by Washington.

The sense of resentment in Vienna and Seibersdorf is palpable. But the machines continue to whir, the computers to hum and the planes to rush the little squares of cotton to Vienna.

After a week of “pre-screening” or preliminary analysis of some of the 10 samples, says Donohue, no suspect plutonium or uranium traces have been found betraying the existence of an illicit nuclear programme.

The simple cotton swabs are put through a rigorous set of hi-tech tests that can identify particles of uranium or plutonium a hundred times finer than a human hair.

Next door to the Russian physicist, a Polish technician, Andrzej Ciurapinski, is running another Iraqi cotton swab through an electron microscope that can identify a picogramme of uranium: that’s 0.000000000001g, or a millionth of a millionth of a gramme.

Along with Hans Blix, the head of the arms inspections, the IAEA chief, Mohamed el-Baradei, is to deliver his first “status report” on the findings in Iraq to the UN security council on Jan 27, a deadline that is now being mooted as a crunch date for a possible US declaration of war.

The Seibersdorf scientists have set themselves a deadline of Jan 17 for completing their tests on the 10 samples so that Dr el-Baradei has ample time to digest their meaning before pronouncing in New York.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.