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.

I feel like re-upping this one.

I generally dislike metaphors when applied to policy discussions. They very rarely, and possibly never, illuminate more than they obfuscate. The “carrot and stick” metaphor used so often in nonproliferation discussions is especially poor for a few reasons, not least of which is that governments dislike being equated with farm animals. Moreover, as is the case with other metaphors, “carrot and stick” can be interpreted differently by different people.

As an illustrative example, I give you the great Malcolm Tucker (Warning: NSFW):

It’s a bit heavy on the negative incentives approach, particularly as compared to the metaphor’s typical use.

There’s still more, hippie.

It was about 13 years ago. Recall that the famous 2007 NIE followed a similar deep dive.

From the UK Iraq Inquiry a few years back:

TIM DOWSE: Although it was unusual then, it has become notquite standard practice, but much more common since,because we did, partly as a result of the Butler Review,establish a challenge team, and there were a series ofpapers over the next few years, none of them relevant toIraq,where we reviewed our judgements.We conducted a very major review,on the Iranian nuclearprogramme in, I think, 2006. That was, for fairly obviousreasons, because of the Iraqi experience. We wanted tolook at it, take a completely fresh look, and say: is thisreally for a military purpose?

I often think this when an organization claims to suffer from a “perception problem.”

I haven’t seen anyone else mention this, though I may well have missed something. One often reads that John Bolton is a skilled bureaucratic warrior, but some details of this WP story suggest otherwise.

In addition to being circumvented by R Giuliani multiple times, Bolton apparently got rolled by G Sondland when it came to the 25 July meeting:

When the White House operator patched Trump through to Zelensky on the morning of July 25, it was despite attempts by Bolton to head off a call he worried would be a “disaster.” Bolton had sought to coach Trump earlier that morning, only to learn later that Sondland had secretly arranged a follow-up conversation and gotten the final word.

Low-hanging fruit is tasty and easily accessible.

So after writing this, I thought I’d add another odd detail of Greece’s compliance with the Ottawa Convention. Specifically, Greece delayed destroying its APLs in part because of an unusual situation involving a Bulgarian subcontractor. According to a statement from a Greek diplomat, the government concluded a contract with Hellenic Defense Systems, which then subcontracted some of the work to VIDEX, the Bulgarian firm. There’s some background on the selection here.

Anyway, the Greek government cancelled the contract:

On 21 June 2010, Greece informed the Standing Committee on Stockpile Destruction that the agreement between the Greek Ministry of Defence and company selected to ensure the destruction of the Greek stockpile had been cancelled on 16 June 2010 due to non-fulfilment of the agreement as result of an industrial accident that took place on 3 February 2010. As a consequence Greece would be unable to complete the destruction of its stockpile by the end of 2010. Greece also indicated that given the situation, a more realistic timeline for completion would be early 2011 and that the Greek Ministry of Defence was proceeding rapidly to engage another company to do the work.

The Small Arms Survey 2013 has some details on the accident involving VIDEX.