Vienna, Austria ? A top U.N. weapons hunter says it would have been “virtually impossible” for Iraq to revive a nuclear bomb program with equipment recently dug up from a Baghdad back yard, as the Bush administration contends.

Jacques Baute said the long-term monitoring of Iraq’s nuclear establishment planned by the U.N. Security Council would have stifled any attempt to build a huge uranium-enrichment plant for making bomb material.

Such contentions ignore the fact that Iraq would have operated for years under international controls had the U.N. plan not been aborted by war, he said.

Baute also said in an interview with The Associated Press that it appeared the unearthed cache of uranium enrichment parts, surrendered by an Iraqi scientist last month, lacked critical components, and its accompanying blueprints were marred by errors.

Baute, a French nuclear physicist, led the International Atomic Energy Agency inspection teams that — until the U.S.-British invasion in March — crisscrossed Iraq in search of banned weapons.

His assessment of the hidden equipment came as a furor grew in Washington over President Bush’s use of an earlier allegation — that Baghdad sought uranium from Niger — to bolster the White House case for war.

It was Baute’s investigation last February that unmasked as forgeries the documents that underpinned the claims about Niger.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is sticking to the Niger story, noting that the British government now says other, unspecified intelligence supports the uranium allegation. But London hasn’t supplied Washington with any such information, Rice acknowledged.

Likewise, Baute’s office has received nothing from the British three weeks after asking for the purported evidence, anonymous sources said.