They weren’t metal and had no songs about nuclear war, AFAICT. But, according to my arbitrary rules, it would be wrong to omit Operation Ivy from any discussion about music and WMD.
Lint: “You can tell Operation Ivy, but you can’t tell ’em much.”
A number of interviews published by the UN Digital Library are relevant to the Iraq WMD issue in audio and print form.
I am lucky enough to have met most of these people over the years. These are worth a listen.
Two articles I have written during the past couple of years:
“Lessons Learned from Denuclearizing States” in Arms Control Today.
“The JCPOA and Safeguards: Model or Outlier?” in the Nonproliferation Review.
Ben Rhodes has a passage in his book, The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House, which exemplifies a certain attitude with respect to diplomacy:
There was a final flurry of meetings in late November 2013. As Kerry negotiated in Geneva with the Iranians and the other P5+1 countries, he’d call back with different formulations on the remaining issues. One of the most contentious was an Iranian insistence that we recognize their “right to enrich uranium”—the process necessary for a civil nuclear program (and a nuclear weapons program); we didn’t want to recognize a right to enrich, and we wanted to assert that any Iranian enrichment had to be negotiated with the P5+1. We had conference call after call, arguing over the most minute language, with Susan demanding changes in wording. Kerry reached a breaking point, shouting into the phone—“Susan, this is a goddamn good deal!” I was a little worried, but Susan assured me that she was just bucking him up. “I want John to be as worried about us as the Iranians,” she said.
Not an uplifting song, but it is the title track. The cover art speaks for itself.
Here’s a bonus…We Gotta Know:
A few days ago, I noted on Twitter that the AEOI published some (relatively) new images of Iranian centrifuges. And this post has some new-ish centrifuge details.
Turns out there’s an ISNA article from November 13 which has some more details (though there is some overlap with the previous post. Not at liberty to share the whole thing, but the cite is: “What Is Going on in Hall S8 of Natanz Site?” (ISNA, published by Ensaf News on 11/13/19). Before we get to the substance, I feel compelled to point out this line:
The S8 hall was like a small farm with all sorts of products…The machines were placed in a way as if we had entered a family gathering with fat, skinny, short, tall, powerful, weak, quick, and slow children.
Anyway, we learn from this article that the IR-9 is 5.5 meters tall and has a capacity of 50 SWU. Also, the IR-6 “is capable of enriching uranium eight times more than the first generation machines”
Other SWU capacities:
Worth remembering that one of Iran’s major incentives negotiate the JCPOA was ending the UNSC Chapter VII treatment of Tehran’s nuclear program. President Rouhani suggested as much this last month:
Dr Rouhani noted, “Some tell us ‘you wasted time talking to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the agency is controlled by the US and the superpowers, and talking to it is futile’, while some say we can negotiate for years and reach a conclusion”.“We were able to resolve the PMD case and announce that the case was closed. This is very heavy for some to take, like a bomb being dropped on them,” said the President.The president added, “When we were negotiating with the six major powers, some would say that these talks are of no use and that we have to resist, while some were in favour of negotiation”.Dr Rouhani pointed out, “It is not easy to negotiate with the six major powers of the world and get them to repeal and retract the six Chapter-VII resolutions. In addition, no country’s right to nuclear activities has not been approved by the United Nations, while it happened only for Iran, which is included in Resolution 2231”.
In his 2019 book The Back Channel, Burns has perhaps the best succinct summary of the Libyan decision to eliminate its WMD Programs:
At that moment in early 2005, the Libyan experience proved that diplomacy could accomplish significant changes in the behavior of difficult regimes. Of course it had to be backed up by other forms of leverage—many years of U.S. and multilateral sanctions; a solid international consensus, codified in UN Security Council resolutions; and the credible threat of force. It also mattered that we set consistent and achievable benchmarks for the negotiations on Lockerbie, terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction (WMD), delivered on our end of the deal, and over a period of years built up a fair amount of trust. Regime change was never the goal, and the Libyan leadership gradually developed a self-interest in changing behavior. It saw little benefit in winding up on the wrong side of the post–9/11 divide, and we provided a difficult but navigable pathway to a form of practical redemption. (page 309).
Salehi provided some in two recent speeches.
Here’s some excerpts from his November 25 press conference
The claims made by some media on which our nuclear industry has been weakened or marginalized is baseless. This industry has been able to increase capacity in 2 months by adding 2660 SWU capacity with advanced centrifuges which is outstanding.
The media and press visit to our R&D facilities demonstrate the 15 new generation machine types produced. Among such advanced devices, some of which were made in the last two months, are IR9 machine with 50 (SWU) capacity and IR modular, IR7, IRs, IR5, IR6+…. ETC, are noticeable.
Before convening JCPOA we had 11/000 (SWU) and after (step 3), the capacity has reached 8600 SWU which is an incredible achievement.
The variety of machine types before was 5 new generation kinds, and after (step 3) this has added up to 15 types which show Iran’s nuclear industry has moved forward strongly.
The purpose of uranium enrichment is to supply fuel for the power plants. With the advances made, last year we were able to produce 30 tons of uranium which, hopefully will reach 50 tons, within a year or two.
Salehi disclosed some other info in a previous press conference:
The rate of the enriched uranium production which prior to the implementation of (step 3) was around 480gr per day, afterwards has reached 5000 gr per day.
In another words, it has been increased by 10 times which happened during the 2 holy months of Moharram and Safar.
Dr. Salehi while appreciating the struggle of the AEOI 15/000 personnel in having access to such achievements further added that:
Today we witness 3 occasions, namely, 30 intermediate chain of IR6 gas feeding opening. Before we had 20 chain of IR6 which was installed on Apr/9 and prior to that we possessed a 10 chain system as well. At present we have around 60 IR6 centrifuges, each one with a 10 (SWU) enrichment capacity. This means 6000 additional (SWU) capacity.
I wrote about this a while back and it was one of my more popular posts.
The New Yorker had a piece which Patrick Radden Keefe explains several methods by which experts determine the age of a given bottle of wine.
Now, whatever else you want to say about nuclear-weapons testing, it apparently has given the world a couple of different ways to figure out if you got your money’s worth by dropping several grand on that bottle of whatever.
According to Keefe, a gentleman had the contents of a particular bottle carbon-dated in an effort to figure out whether he had been swindled. That’s where nuclear-testing came into play:
All organic material contains the radioactive isotope carbon 14, which exhibits a predictable rate of decay; scientists can thus analyze the amount of the isotope in a bottle of wine in order to approximate its age. Carbon 14 has a long half-life, and carbon dating is relatively imprecise for evaluating objects that are several centuries old. But *nuclear atmospheric tests in the nineteen-fifties and sixties offer a benchmark of sorts, since levels of carbon 14 rise sharply during that period. In this case, the amounts of carbon 14 and of another isotope, tritium, were much higher than one would expect for two-hundred-year-old wine*, and the scientists concluded that the bottle contained a mixture of wines, nearly half of which dated to 1962 or later.
Similarly, Philippe Hubert, a French physicist, developed a method of determining the age of wine which also is related to nuke testing. Keefe writes that Hubert
had devised a method of testing the age of wine without opening the bottle. Hubert uses low-frequency gamma rays to detect the presence of the radioactive isotope cesium 137. Unlike carbon 14, cesium 137 is not naturally occurring; it is a direct result of nuclear fallout. A wine bottled before the advent of atmospheric nuclear testing contains no cesium 137, so the test yields no results for older wines. But if a wine does contain cesium 137 the short half-life of the isotope—thirty years—allows Hubert to make a more precise estimate of its age.