If you’re a complete dork and looking for a compilation of Wassenaar Arrangement documents, here it is. Current as of January 2013.

A while back, a CIA report argued that “it seems unlikely that or any major power can prevent the emergence of more nuclear explosives states because”:

–the requisite materials and technology are already too widely available for technical safeguards and international regulations to be effective.

–competition among the nuclear supplier states guarantees threshold states that diverting and diversifying power programs into explosives programs will not deny them a source of nuclear materials or technology.

–legal restraints on proliferation have lost much of their effectiveness because of the growing political confrontation between industrialized and less developed countries.

–political pressures against proliferation only tend to confirm the view that the nuclear-haves are trying to deny all other countries a valuable prize.

That was written almost 38 years ago in a December 1975 CIA Research Study titled Managing Nuclear Proliferation: The Politics of Limited Choice. The National Security Archives folks published this a while back, but I happened to notice this part of it.

For those who may be interested, the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament has annual reports dating back to 1995 available here.

Only in recent years did the reports really start talking about proliferation. The counterproliferation section of the 2012-2013 report is here.

I didn’t notice anything terribly interesting, but take a look.

We’ve all seen claims that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons, but I’m not sure I’ve seen any mentions of last month’s claim from the French Foreign Ministry that government forces sprayed sarin from a helicopter.

Take a look:

Q – Has France ever tried to verify allegations of the use of chemical weapons by rebels?

A – Of course.

Q – Without success?

A – We have no evidence that would allow us to draw the conclusions we’ve drawn about the regime with respect to the opposition. The same holds true for U.S. officials. Not only is there nothing to indicate that the opposition might have used such weapons, everything leads us to think that that isn’t the case.

So let’s allow the commission of inquiry to do its work in Syria to verify, on the ground, the accusations made by the regime against the opposition. And we will then see how true the regime’s accusations are. What we can say today, officially, affirmatively, and proven scientifically, is that the regime has used them against the opposition. To be even more specific, they have sprayed sarin by helicopter.

Seems that knowing the truth behind this claim would tell us something about what the Syrian government is actually thinking regarding chemical weapons.

Not that they’re that hard to find, but if you all of the INFCIRCs on Iran, here they are.