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A Turkish military officer has revealed that Turkey's intelligence service believes Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime has successfully produced a nuclear device.

According to U.S. intelligence officials the new intelligence on Iraq's nuclear weapons efforts was obtained in early March and adds to a growing body of intelligence on Saddam's efforts to produce nuclear arms.

No details of the type of nuclear weapon were disclosed, but Iraq is believed to be developing a uranium-fueled nuclear device.

A senior defense official said the threat from Saddam's chemical, biological and nuclear programs continues to grow, and the most worrying is his "energetic nuclear weapons program."

An Iraqi nuclear weapons engineer, Khidir Hamza, defected to the United States in 1996 and disclosed that Iraq switched from a plutonium-based nuclear arms program to one based on enriched uranium, which can be produced from natural uranium mined in Iraq. According to Hamza, Iraq has some 400 locations where it is producing nuclear weapons and related material, making U.N. inspections in a search for those programs nearly impossible.

The nuclear program is being carried out in schools, mosques, hospitals and warehouses," the defense official said. "The possibility of finding them and destroying them is negligible. We can't say when (Saddam) will cross that threshold, but he will. It could be tomorrow, it could be a year from now. If he successfully buys weapons-grade uranium, he may already have a nuclear device. But he certainly, if he doesn't have one now, is going to get one. And when he does the whole geopolitics of the region will be changed fundamentally."

Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Sunday that Saddam is "working feverishly" on nuclear weapons but had not made any recent breakthroughs in his weapons program.

The disclosure comes amid secret U.S. government efforts to oust the Iraqi leader.

Last week U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said progress had been made in resuming weapons inspection in Iraq. Annan said the progress was the result of talks with senior Iraqi technicians, including Jafaar Dhia Jafaar, one of its senior nuclear physicists, and Gen. Amir H. Al-Saadi, a key player in the Iraqi weapons programs. The men are personal advisers to Saddam and were involved in U.N. inspections in the early 1990s.

Annan told reporters that the Iraqis are attempting to link Baghdad's granting of new weapons inspections in Iraq to assurances that the United States would end its efforts to change the Baathist regime and with ending air exclusion zones.

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