United Nations ? Dozens of suppliers, most in Europe, the United States and Japan, provided the components and know-how Saddam Hussein needed to build an atomic bomb, according to Iraq’s 1996 accounting of its nuclear program.

The secret declaration, shown to The Associated Press, is virtually identical to the one submitted to U.N. inspectors on Dec. 7, according to U.N. officials. The reports have not been made public to prevent nuclear know-how from falling into the wrong hands and also to protect the names of companies that wittingly or unwittingly supplied Iraq with the means to make nuclear weapons.

That foreign companies helped Iraq has long been known, and some of them have been identified before, but the Iraqi accounting adds up to the most exhaustive list so far of companies involved.

Iraq’s report says the equipment was either sold or made by more than 30 German companies, 10 American companies, 11 British companies and a handful of Swiss, Japanese, Italian, French, Swedish and Brazilian firms. It says more than 30 countries supplied its nuclear program.

It details nuclear efforts from the early 1980s to the Gulf War and contains diagrams, plans and test results in uranium enrichment, detonation, implosion testing and warhead construction.

The Iraqis had everything they needed to make nuclear weapons, said Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project, a Washington-based think tank on nuclear arms control.

“They weren’t missing any components or any knowledge,” Milhollin said in a telephone interview. “It was simply a matter of time.”