SOMEONE LEFT THE YELLOWCAKE OUT IN THE RAIN:

Saddam's nuclear plans hidden under plant (AP, September 24, 2004)

An Iraqi scientist-turned-author says the most significant pieces of his country's dormant nuclear program were buried under a lotus tree in his backyard, untouched for more than a decade before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

In The Bomb in my Garden, Mahdi Obeidi details fallen Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's furious, and then abandoned, quest for a nuclear bomb before the 1991 war.

''Although Saddam never had nuclear weapons at his disposal, the story of how close Iraq came to developing them should serve as a red flag to the international community,'' Obeidi writes with his co-author, Kurt Pitzer.