He is widely known by American and international officials including UN Chief Inspector David Kay (1991-1992) as the father of the Iraqi Nuclear Program.
)in July 1962 to commence research for the Ph.D. at Birmingham using the 1 GeV Synchrotron, which was initiated by Professors Sir Mark Oliphant and Philip Burton Moon in the late forties producing first beams in 1953, that was accelerating protons and deuterons.
This was the highest energy machine in the UK at the time to be superseded by the 7 GeV weak focusing synchrotron(Nimrod) in 1963/1964 at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
The Tuwaitha site was under construction via a contract with Technopromexport, which was a Soviet Union engineering company in charge of foreign energy projects.
The site comprised the IRT-2000 swimming pool research reactor with 2000 kW thermal power, radioisotope production facilities, a workshop, and an administration building.
Jafar became head of the Physics Department at NRC in 1967 and worked towards the utilization of neutron beams from the reactor's horizontal channels.
Ge(Li) γ-ray detectors were used inside a large cylindrical three crystal NaI(Tl) scintillation detectors for pair and anti-compton γ-spectrometry to study radiative thermal neutron capture (n,γ) and inelastic fast neutron (n,n'γ) scattering using separated isotopes as targets.
In September 1970, Jafar became a research associate at the Physics Department of Imperial College London(ICL) and was seconded immediately to CERN in Geneva as a visiting scientist joining the high energy physics experimental group comprising ICL, ETH Zurich, CERN and Saclay Nuclear Research Centre(SNRC).
Neutral final states were selected through an electronic trigger system and V particle decays were registered inside conventional spark chambers, placed within a magnetic field, viewed stereoscopically by a fast film camera.
During this period Jafar was also active in developing a high efficiency large area scintillation detector for slow K+ mesons that could be used as part of a trigger in selecting K-p→≡*-K+ interactions.
IAEC decided to purchase from France a high neutron flux reactor, similar to Osiris/Isis at SNRC, to be built at a site within NRC in Tuwaitha.
On December 8, 1979 Jafar wrote a memorandum to President Saddam Hussein informing that Dr. Shahristani was not known to have any anti-Government political activity and that he was an important member of NRC's top scientific staff requesting his release and return to work.
Both sons were enrolled in Seaford College, where Jafar was educated two decades before and surprisingly under the same headmaster (The Revd Charles Johnson).
On Thursday, January 17, 1980 Jafar was escorted from NRC by one plain clothes officer from the Intelligence Service (Mukhabarat) ostensibly for a five minute questioning session.
After a few months, Jafar was moved to a Mukhabarat safe house in the Masbah area of Baghdad with six guards, including a cook, on duty.
Early in September 1981, Jafar was taken to meet with President Saddam Hussein at the Presidential Palace in the presence of Barzan Al- Tikriti.
During this meeting, Saddam Hussein tasked Jafar to develop a clandestine nuclear programme leading eventually to a weapon relying entirely on Iraqi manpower.
[26][17][19][27] Detailed studies of the gas diffusion process focused on the development of a suitable porous barrier that allows non-viscous molecular flow of uranium hexafluoride(UF6) at the operating conditions of a plant comprising several hundred separation stages.