Treasure Hunt in Iraq - 7 February 2003

Like a death in the family, the loss of the men and women on the Columbia shuttle brought a humble pause to all the noise of the public debate over the ogre Saddam Hussein and his misdeeds.

So long as the funeral service was proceeding and we saw the astronauts' families - stoic or broken or inert - we were spared the professional television commentators, the men who know all there is to know about everything and can't wait to tell us.

But they turned out anyway to be old astronauts, Nasa experts, aviation consultants, and to a man they started to mention heat tiles.

When I first heard the words "the probable loss of a heat tile" I was looking at a panning shot of the mourners who'd not yet risen to go home.

The camera stopped on the profile, the granitey profile of an old man.

It was the profile of John Glenn, former marine colonel, the first American to orbit the Earth, the hero of a television audience in a hundred countries way back there just 41 years ago.

The phrase "heat tile", "heat shield" must have hit him like the point of a dagger.

It sent me directly back to my report of that February day and in particular to the dread few minutes when Glenn, in a Mercury capsule called Friendship 7, lost communication with Houston and Houston thought the worst had happened.

Let me tell you about the worst.

Houston Mercury control must have had an awful time throughout the whole three orbits for during the first orbit a warning light flickered in Houston which signalled the loosening or unlatching of the heat shield.

Now this was a six-foot-in-diameter plastic shield, fastened to the front end of the capsule, against which Glenn's head lay.

The plastic shield was the astronaut's barrier against a fiery death indeed.

The shield was constructed to withstand the 3,000-degree heat that flares up when the capsule rips back into our atmosphere at a speed, it could be, of 17,000 miles an hour.

Below that outer shield were three rockets in a linen bag or pack which, once fired, brake his speed and fire him out of orbit and back to Earth, so to speak.

When the time came to order the firing of the rockets, Mercury control told Glenn to retain the package that held the rockets.

They might, if the shield was to vanish, provide a second line of defence - a desperate remedy.

The most poignant exchange came when they told him to hold on to the package of rockets.

Glenn: "Can you tell me the reason for this?"

Mercury control: "They'll tell you over the Cape."

And then they ordered him to fire.

If the heat shield flew off Glenn would be burned to a cinder in an instant.

No word. A crackle of static and the swishing of a carrier wave for two and a half awful minutes.

Two men at Mercury control down in Houston fainted.

All around the world huge dumb crowds stood silently gaping at screens in theatres, railroad stations, stadiums - and then two words came in loud and clear and live: "Friendship 7".

Never did "friendship" carry a more blessed sound.

When they got him back on the ground both the controllers and the press were eager to know what John Glenn had known and how he'd taken it.

To everyone's relief Glenn had no suspicion that the heat shield had come loose.

But after the firing, when the capsule was hurling downward, he noticed bits of fiery stuff, like shreds of a burning flag, going by the window - it was the rocket package burning up and vaporising.

And then for a second or two, hurtling at 15,000 miles an hour, the chilling thought occurred to him that maybe it was the heat shield beginning to break up.

At which mind, very quickly, took over matter.

"I was suddenly," he said, "very supersensitive along my er ... backside."

Had it scared him?

"It had given me a moment of some concern."

I wonder how much of this went through the mind above the fixed, motionless face of John Glenn the other sad afternoon?

Once the service was over, the various experts began to look for causes, reasons and lapses in the launch, in the control of the capsule and in no time at all of course there would be fidgeting muck-rakers poised to pounce on everybody from the designers of the capsule system to the controllers of this mission for dereliction of duty, if not criminal carelessness.

But the experts reported only that so far they knew something had fallen off more or less on takeoff but that after several days into flight they'd stopped worrying about it.

The prevailing belief is that the heat tiles - they are now - fell off or otherwise failed.

A huge hunt for debris is on - it's more like an Antarctic exploration - for debris that has been flung across many hundreds of miles.

The hunt, by the way, is expected to take possibly a year or more, since lots of what might be significant bits could lie as deep in the soil of impenetrable woods as most of Saddam's biochemical weapons are buried in Iraq.

Of course the towering political event of the week was the appearance of former general, now Secretary of State, Colin Powell - to present what he called irrefutable and undeniable evidence that since the beginning of the new round of inspections Saddam has continued without a moment's repentance to develop nuclear weapons and has hidden away, with no intention of uncovering, huge stores of chemical and biological weapons.

Before General Powell gave his case for the prosecution the question among the 15 members of the Security Council and the attending inspectors, ambassadors, representatives of the coalition - the question the listening delegates were anxious to discover was, how much declassified information will he give us?

The question for the Secretary himself was, how much dare I declassify?

This has been the problem since the start of the new inspections, and the one that has led to two different interpretations of the inspectors' job.

The countries that are most reluctant to go to war stick to the belief or the theory that the inspectors' job is to track down hidden weapons and/or the means to make them.

In simpler words this is a treasure hunt. And even the French admit that looking for a small, torpedo-shaped object, let alone a test tube, in a landscape the area of California, which is 850 miles long and about 200 miles wide, is a testy, tedious business.

Hence some of the shrinkers, self-called peace-makers, would like to send more and more inspectors.

This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the Council resolution that ordered the inspections.

A misunderstanding no longer shared, if ever, by the two leading men - Hans Blix, the biochemical detective, and his associate, the nuclear prober.

They left this week after very little speech to the press to go to Baghdad to make clear that they find Saddam not in compliance with the Council resolution and declaring that he must perform a drastic change in his behaviour.

Secretary Powell played over intercepted conversations which are just about as damning as such tapes could be, inquiring whether a vital object of the search had been covered up or removed before the UN inspectors might stumble on it.

Indeed the watchword of the non-cooperating Iraqis seems to have been, as in one tape: make sure there's nothing there, destroy evidence and documents, cover up, cover up.

The Secretary also showed aerial photographs of many moving trucks. If they were not carrying chemical munitions why were they all trailed by identifiable decontamination trucks?

It was curious that in that interview last weekend Saddam said that a weapon of mass destruction is a large and cumbersome object. It's not, he said, an aspirin tablet you can carry in your pocket.

He's wrong or, shall I say, speaks falsely about that.

Eighteen months ago, shortly after 11 September, I had the honour of a visit from a distinguished scientist, a world expert on building and maintaining the foundations of tunnels.

He'd been called in to Ground Zero to see what could best be done with the underground damage at the site - the damage to drains, electricity, cables, the subway system, which had gone down the depth of nine storeys of a skyscraper.

Visiting me later he looked out my study window at the placid reservoir of Central Park.

There was, as always, a jogger going round and my scientist said casually: "Just to think, an envelope slipped into that reservoir and you might leave a hundred thousand New Yorkers without any drinking water."

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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