The New York Times reported Monday that U.S. officials say Iraq has reconfigured rocket warheads from its stockpiles of imported or home-built weapons. Some of these makeshift weapons have been used by Iraq with both conventional and chemical warheads.

But officials told Fox News that the weapons are not rockets, but large bombs that can be dropped from wings of airplanes. Soccer-ball-sized cluster bombs then are released from the larger bombs. When triggered by a fuse, these smaller submunitions can disperse chemical or biological agents.

Iraq claimed these cluster munitions were used as high explosives and were supposed to bounce. It said the rocket was designed as a conventional cluster bomb, which would scatter explosive submunitions over its target, and not as a chemical weapon.

But the United States didn't buy that argument, and the Iraqis have now admitted that some might have been configured as chemical weapons.

"If you take the kinds of fuses we know they have, and you screw them in there, when these things come out from the main frame and they explode inward, chemical agents come out," one U.S. official told the Times. "These can be used for biological weapons, too."