The South Africans decided that they would like to prove to the world they did not have any nuclear weapons and their decision was not doubted because it was the end of the Cold War, it was also the end of apartheid.

Iraq did not spontaneously opt for disarmament. They did it as part of a ceasefire, so they were forced to do it, otherwise the war might have gone on. So the motivation has been very different.

It was to do with information management. The intention was to dramatise it.

On big issues like war in Iraq, but in many other issues they simply must be multilateral. There's no other way around. You have the instances like the global warming convention, the Kyoto protocol, when the U.S. went its own way.

The inspections started in 1991, right after the Gulf War. One of the conditions for the ceasefire was that Iraq had to do away with all of its weapons of mass destruction - biological, chemical and nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.

If you take the biological weapons in the United States we still will have perhaps a single individual who was able to make anthrax, dry it, and spread it through the mail and cause terror.

They have been saying for a long time that Iraq made an effort to import active uranium, and my colleague demonstrated the other day that they came to the conclusion that it was a fake document that everybody is relying upon.