Iraq purchased about 90 gyroscopes for Soviet SS-18 Satan missiles in then 1990s according to reliable sources. During the 90s there was a lot of plutonium and enriched uranium easy for the Russian mafia and enterprising military officers and many others to take from unsecure Soviet-era stockpiles and numerous locations.
Apparently enriched uranium that is made from natural rather than reprocessed sources can be handled even without gloves-it doesn't radiate much and is a heavy metal I would guess like lead. If Iraq got a few hundred pounds and the top-secret agent buried it in the desert it could still be there undiscovered.
Obviously Saddam Hussein hadn't the opportunity to build a very large ballistic missile though he evidently intended or hoped to one day. Like Johhny Cash's auto built 'one piece at a time' the late Iraqi leader may have been compiling a piece here and a gyroscope there for a project that never got off the ground.
If the secret of the location of the hot items for bomb-making were not very classified to Hussein and a very few other intelligence agents it would be surprising. It would not especially be surprising that the material wasn't used or found during the conflict or after. Iran too is likely to have found a way to purchase enough plutonium and enriched uranium for several bombs one would think-that nation isn't very far from Kazahkstan and Russia, and they had the entire Clinton administration era to stock up. It isn't hard to imagine that an Iranian agent with a million dollars in a bag would have found it too hard to get a Russian enttrepreneur with access to sell a 50 or a few hundred pounds.
The Bush I era Congress and Clinton administration evidently dropped the ball on the issue of security for post-cold war era Soviet radioactive materials of which there was thousands and thousands of pounds of unsecured stuff at numerous locations.
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