During a 1997 Senate hearing , Robert Einhorn, then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Nonproliferation provided one of the fullest explanations I’ve seen of the transfer of ring magnets from China to Pakistan:

Mr. Einhorn. We believe it is credible that central, senior-level Chinese authorities did not know of in advance and did not approve of that transaction, and the reason why we believe that is not just because senior Chinese officials told us that. It is because of our understanding of the Chinese system and how it operates. This transaction was probably less than $70,000. Ring magnets are very unsophisticated kinds of devices. They were treated under their export control system as general commercial goods and it is very plausible, in our view, that this transaction would have been treated as a routine kind of transaction. And the more we learn about the rudimentary State of Chinese export controls on dual-use items, the more plausible it becomes that this particular transaction would have been made without high-level governmental knowledge…

I never made the connection.

The savage mutilation
Of the human race
Is set on course

Protest and survive!
Protest and survive!

This 1960 report from the Australian Joint Intelligence Committee, titled Nuclear Weapons and Guided Missiles in Communist China up to the End of 1965, states that

We believe that China intends to acquire a full range of nuclear weapons and guided missiles as soon as practicable.

and

China has indigenous sources of uranium and is capable of producing uranium metal for use as fuel in a nuclear reactor. There is, however, no evidence to date of any activity which could be directly related to nuclear weapon trial or development and there are no known facilities for substantial production of the necessary fissile material.

China has the scientific and technical ability, unaided, to produce a very limited number of nuclear weapons and, assuming that a major effort is made, a nuclear weapon programme could be in operation by 1965.

China, of course, tested a nuclear weapon in 1964.

Not really a song about nuclear weapons, but there’s this line:

They keep their fucking power cause their finger’s on the button
They’ve got control and won’t let it be forgotten

On December7, the UNGA ,”acting on the recommendation of its First Committee (Disarmament and International Security), adopted 66 resolutions and decisions today.” Here’s a long document explaining all of that.

I have previously written about Crass and their involvement in fabricating a recording between Reagan and Thatcher. This Bandcamp profile has even more information about that episode:

“Around then, we started getting classified information from grunts and sailors who were actually in the service… What the hell do you do with classified information?!” Rimbaud recalls. “That is a serious offense! Then, we pulled our greatest trick ever.”

Using the classified information they had received, the band crafted a recording which appeared to be a conversation between Thatcher and Reagan discussing the sinking of The Sheffield and the General Belgrano, ships involved in the Falklands conflict. The band then sent the tapes to the British press anonymously, expecting chaos to ensue. Surely, such a hot item would be a major, stop-the-presses event…

“After we sent it to the press world, it completely disappeared and we heard nothing,” Rimbaud says. “And then four or five months later it appeared in the Pentagon and was described by them as being a KGB operation to undermine American power. They were saying it could lead to World War 3! We could sit here and say we did a tape and now it’s being put forward as this thing, which is very funny in one respect… but it’s not very funny in another. So we were always in this ambiguity.”

Eventually, someone informed the press that the culprits behind the scam were, indeed, Crass. To this day, the band doesn’t know who leaked that info, though by this time, their phones were being tapped by the police and possibly other third-parties. The Observer got in touch with the band, and through a series of negotiations, Rimbaud agreed to admit that they created the tapes… if The Observer published the entire transcript of the tape on its front page. To Rimbaud’s surprise, the paper did indeed publish the entire transcript, which included classified information previously only known to the British government. “Then, the shit really hit the fan,” Rimbaud says. All sorts of people were getting in touch with us, including the KGB.”

There’s more. Read the the whole thing.

About a month ago, Chris Ford made a speech in which he asserted that Russia has a biological weapons program:

In August 2020, the U.S. Department of Commerce added to its “Entity List ” of persons and organizations found to be engaged in “activities contrary to U.S. national security and/or foreign policy interests” three institutions “associated with the Russian biological weapons program .” This action highlighted in public for the first time the fact that there is a Russian biological weapons program, and all should take note of this.

Here’s the relevant portion of the Commerce action to which he referred:

The ERC also has reasonable cause to believe that 48th Central Scientific Research Institute, Kirov; 48th Central Scientific Research Institute, Sergiev Posad; and 48th Central Scientific Research Institute, Yekaterinburg are Ministry of Defense facilities associated with the Russian biological weapons program.

The SPND (or Defense Research and Innovation Organization) has been in the news ever since the death of the organization’s founder, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. According to State’s most recent compliance report, the SPND is “an organization subordinate to the Iranian Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics [MODAFL] that conducts military research and development – on weaponization-relevant dual-use technical activities.” The EU described the SPND somewhat similarly in 2012 and also identified the organization as “part of” MODAFL. The MODAFL association seems relevant to me because President Rouhani recently opined that “the Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces’ Logistics will fill this scientist’s place with his colleagues and students with increasing self-sacrifice and efforts.”

Here’s a fuller description from State a few years back:

The Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND) is a Tehran-based entity that is primarily responsible for research in the field of nuclear weapons development. SPND was established in February 2011 by the UN-sanctioned individual Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who for many years has managed activities useful in the development of a nuclear explosive device. Fakhrizadeh led such efforts in the late 1990s or early 2000s, under the auspices of the “AMAD Plan, the MODAFL subsidiary Section for Advanced Development Applications and Technologies (SADAT) and Malek Ashtar University of Technology (MUT). In February 2011, Fakhrizadeh left MUT to establish SPND. Fakhrizadeh was designated in UNSCR 1747 (2007) and by the United States in July 2008 for his involvement in Iran’s proscribed WMD activities. SPND took over some of the activities related to Iran’s undeclared nuclear program that had previously been carried out by Iran’s Physics Research Center, the AMAD Plan, MUT, and SADAT.

Iran has issued a couple of recent statements concerning the SPND’s activities. Fro example, this letter to the UN described Fakhrizadeh’s

outstanding role in the development of the first indigenous coronavirus disease (COVID-19) test kit, which is a great contribution to our national efforts in curbing the COVID-19 pandemic…He was also supervising the development of a COVID-19 vaccine.

From State’s 2020 CWC compliance report: