Israel claimed that Iraq would be able to use the reactor to make nuclear weapons but I have read conflicting opinions on this topic. Considering half the world went to war with Iraq about 12 years later, I want to know how likely is it that Iraq would have had real WMDs in that time-span (assuming their reactor wasn't destroyed by Iran or someone else). Or would the reactor been useless in making atomic weapons?
Hi, good question.
There are a lot of debates on the topic, actually. Part of the problem is asking "what if?". The question becomes complicated when we do that. So bear with me, please.
The question is whether or not Iraq was actually planning to make nuclear weapons at all, as far as I can tell. Israeli intelligence, according to Rodger Claire in Raid on the Sun, estimated that the Osirak reactor would go hot by 1980 or so, with the ability to create 2-3 atomic bombs equivalent to Hiroshima's bomb per year. He details conversations he reportedly found by interviewing everyone involved who was still alive about the plans for the bomb and for Operation Opera. In 1979, he claims that Saddam Hussein strode into Osirak, and asked a simple question: "When are you going to deliver the plutonium?" When someone asked him what the plutonium was for, he said "for the bomb". He told the scientists not to worry about the treaty, and to focus on the bomb, saying he would deal with treaties. He also details the enrichment of uranium to levels far beyond those necessary for research or fuel, up to 93% enrichment, which is weapons-grade from what I've understood, as Iraq sought out reactors working on this basis specifically.
France, one of the primary people involved in the reactor, claimed that Iraq did not intend to use it for weapons purposes as per their agreements. This is reinforced by IAEA inspectors who claim that they had sufficient safeguards to prove this would not happen, but others claim the IAEA's safeguards were insufficient to actually check. One of the scientists who denies Osirak was going to produce weapons, is Harvard physics professor Richard Wilson, who inspected the partially damaged reactor in 1982. He claimed it would've taken "decades, not years" to produce a bomb there, but that Iraq was not actually planning to do so. There's an interesting old article on the issue, published back in 1984 in Air University Review, which you can find here on the subject. It lays out numerous reasons why it seems unlikely that Iraq did not seek to produce nuclear weapons. It points to the types of materials and reactors Iraq was buying from France, and its attempts to get those that would be most useful for weapons production. I can't be sure about it all, I'm not a nuclear scientist, but it remains a considerable debate.
Interestingly, in "Saddam, Israel, and the Bomb", using records captured after the Iraq war, the authors conclude that Saddam Hussein definitely had the intent of developing a nuclear weapon with which to displace Israel, and expressed as much in private messages. The authors note that:
Saddam’s aim was not to launch a surprise first strike against Israel; rather, he believed that an Iraqi bomb would neutralize Israeli nuclear threats, force the Jewish state to fight at the conventional level, and thereby allow Iraq and its Arab allies to prosecute a prolonged war that would displace Israel from the territories occupied in 1967. In short, Saddam expected that an unconventional arsenal would permit Iraq to achieve a conventional victory, thereby weakening Israel geopolitically and making him a hero to the Arab world.
Now, as for Osirak specifically, and the Gulf War in 1991...whether or not Iraq could have had a bomb is also interesting to ponder. While it's unclear if Iraq had yet begun the necessary path to a bomb, it does seem to be true that Iraq planned to get one. How long that would take, and whether this was rhetoric, is somewhat debated. I tend to believe it wasn't just rhetoric, as do the authors who looked at those documents I mentioned. But the program was nearly impossible with regards to Osirak alone, most seem to say, and the program was also very disoriented and chaotic.
So what's the conclusion I would draw? I'd say Iraq wanted nuclear weapons. I'd say Israel didn't know if Iraq was getting them, but did know it wanted them, and didn't trust that it would be found out if it tried. I'd say Iraq wanted them, but didn't have the capability to get them quickly or easily at all, and that Osirak was not sufficient for it.
Hope that maybe clears it up a tad. It's quite complicated.
*Actually it was in 1981, but the question still stands.