I previously wrote about this December 2019 CIA article titled “An Intelligence Perspective: North Korea’s Nuclear Program: The Early Days, 1984–2002.” This part caught my eye:

I can’t speak to whether it’s necessary to reprocess this type of spent fuel. But some of the work done pursuant to the 1994 Agreed Framework may provide a clue. According to the that agreement, the United States and North Korea were to

cooperate in finding a method to store safely the spent fuel from the 5 MW(E) experimental reactor during the construction of the LWR project, and to dispose of the fuel in a safe manner that does not involve reprocessing in the DPRK.

It looks as if the CIA claim may be accurate. This Sandia report describes the nature of spent fuel from Magnox reactors:

The fuel itself is uranium metal, which corrodes much more easily than uranium oxide fuel found in light water reactors. When in contact with water, metallic uranium converts to uranium oxide and uranium hydride. Both uranium metal and uranium hydride are pyrophoric, which presents a fire hazard.

The report further noted that

If the DPRK did not reprocess the spent fuel removed from the storage pool, and just stored it without special care in a dry pit or another water pool, the spent fuel may have undergone severe corrosion. Magnox spent fuel presents a spontaneous fire hazard due to uranium hydride, and may leak fission products through corroded cladding, eventually contaminating the surroundings.

The notional storage time of the canned North Korean spent fuel in the dedicated pool was up to three years, according to the same report. The rest of the plans for the fuel were complicated and involved removing the spent fuel from North Korea. This all suggests to me that, as a practical matter, Pyongyang may have been unable to store the fuel indefinitely.

North Korea did, of course, later conclude a comprehensive safeguards agreement and to get rid of the spent fuel and reprocessing facility.

I mentioned here that much Iraqi intel on Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program was bad. Here are some examples:

The CIA published an article in 2013 titled Iraqi Human Intelligence Collection on Iran’s Nuclear
Weapons Program, 1980–2003. The piece demonstrates that much Iraqi intel was bad, but it’s worth a look at its accounts of Iran’s interactions with foreign entities.

FWIW, the 2007 NIE assessed “with low confidence that Iran probably has imported at least some weapons-usable fissile material,.” And former DCI John Deutch testified in 1996 that “Iran has launched a parallel effort to purchase fissile material, mainly from sources in the former Soviet Union.:”

• Iranian agents have contacted officials at nuclear facilities in Kazakhstan on several occasions, attempting to acquire nuclear-related materials. For example, in 1992, Iran unsuccessfully approached the Ulba Metallurgical Plant to obtain enriched uranium. 
• In 1993, three Iranians believed to have had connections to Iran’s intelligence service, were arrested in Turkey while seeking to acquire nuclear material from smugglers from the former Soviet Union. 

My former office mate Jeffrey tweeted this video in response to this post:

Following up on this post, this paragraph also caught my eye:

The computer, one might well conclude, was conceived in sin. Its birth helped ratchet up, by several orders of magnitude, the destructive force available to the superpowers during the cold war. And the man most responsible for the creation of that first computer, John von Neumann, was himself among the most ardent of the cold warriors, an advocate of a preemptive military attack on the Soviet Union, and one of the models for the film character Dr. Strangelove. As George Dyson writes in his superb new history, Turing’s Cathedral, “The digital universe and the hydrogen bomb were brought into existence at the same time.” Von Neumann had seemingly made a deal with the devil: “The scientists would get the computers, and the military would get the bombs.

In December, the CIA published a an edition of Studies In Intelligence with an article titled “North Korea’s Nuclear Program: The Early Days, 1984–2002.” I disagree with some of the author’s analysis, but the piece is worth a read. For example, I don’t recall seeing this level of detail concerning N Korean HE testing, though I can’t say I’ve looked lately:

Here are the footnotes:

It’s perhaps obvious, but I feel compelled to include this observation:

In Asia, North Korean nuclear questions were not a focus of intelligence or policy concern. Rather, attention was focused on [possible nuclear proliferation by] Taiwan and South Korea.

I recently posted some speeches by former Pakistani officials associated with that country’s nuclear weapons program. I thought I’d put them all in one place:

Re-upping this one. A while back, an NYRB piece about Alan Turing, whom the author identifies as “the man who…had originally worked out the possibility of a universal computer.” The advent of said computer is, of course, of interest to nuclear weapons geeks:

The digital universe came into existence, physically speaking, late in 1950, in Princeton, New Jersey, at the end of Olden Lane. That was when and where the first genuine computer—a high-speed, stored-program, all-purpose digital-reckoning device—stirred into action. It had been wired together, largely out of military surplus components, in a one-story cement-block building that the Institute for Advanced Study had constructed for the purpose. The new machine was dubbed MANIAC, an acronym of “mathematical and numerical integrator and computer.”

And what was MANIAC used for, once it was up and running? Its first job was to do the calculations necessary to engineer the prototype of the hydrogen bomb. Those calculations were successful. On the morning of November 1, 1952, the bomb they made possible, nicknamed “Ivy Mike,” was secretly detonated over a South Pacific island called Elugelab. The blast vaporized the entire island, along with 80 million tons of coral. One of the air force planes sent in to sample the mushroom cloud—reported to be “like the inside of a red-hot furnace”—spun out of control and crashed into the sea; the pilot’s body was never found. A marine biologist on the scene recalled that a week after the H-bomb test he was still finding terns with their feathers blackened and scorched, and fish whose “skin was missing from a side as if they had been dropped in a hot pan.”

A more recent issue of the Review had an exchange about who was actually responsible for creating the first computer. I am far from qualified to evaluate it, but enjoy.

Almost 10 years ago, the NYRB blog hosted a debate about nuclear deterrence. There are lots of great names here, but I especially like this line from Jeremy Bernstein:

The notion of having an “independent deterrent” may sound sensible until one looks into what in the British case this actually is: one submarine wandering around submerged. When I read about this I kept thinking of the Beatles song, “We all live in a yellow submarine.”

Pakistani Air Commodore (Retd) Khalid Banuri spoke about India and nuclear weapons last autumn at CISS: