Speaking of former IAEA and UNMOVIC official Demetrius Perricos, I thought I’d share this excerpt from the same interview [not sure why that the link’s not working]:

Demetrius: The waste had been accumulated on a hill – big waste drums, lots of waste, from filters they were using, uranium deposits. And some of it we wanted to measure to make a rough estimate of how much was in the waste. So we could close a material balance. We had to figure out how to measure a drum. It was on a hill with thousands of drums of depleted Uranium with various enrichments, and of course pieces of material and filters and things. To try to do a completely random proper scientific selection – to get the last drum in the last row – it’s difficult. So we had trouble with that logistically.But another problem – there were snakes everywhere -cobras, pythons – but people really did the best job they could. It was South Africa, don’t forget that!

Perricos wrote more about the RSA case here.

Worth a listen, especially if you have any interest in US intel regarding both the 1979 Iranian revolution and Iraq WMD in the early 2000s.

This is obvious, but I can’t omit it.

Reflex in the sky /warn you you’re gonna die/
Storm coming, you’d better hide/ from the atomic tide.

As I said, there are many non-hippie songs about nuclear weapons.

Not that I’ve looked, but I don’t remember reading this rationale for the Obama administration’s efforts to incentivize Syria to accede to the CWC, etc.. Essentially, Derek Chollet told the New Yorker last month that the US needed to prevent ISIS from seizing the weapons and thereby creating the need for a military invasion:

The operation to remove chemical arms from Syria concluded in the summer of 2014, just as isis swept in from the desert. Had those weapons remained, the U.S. might well have felt compelled to send a huge force to seize them. “Obama would have invaded Syria,” Chollet said. “We could not have allowed even the smallest chance that isis could have gotten hold of them.” Instead, Obama dispatched some seven thousand American troops to northeast Syria and to Iraq in order to fight isis. After they arrived, a de-facto no-fly zone was established in Kurdish-controlled northeast Syria. The policy, which remains in effect, has kept Assad and his allies from bombing civilians in the area.

Absolute classic thrash metal song about nuclear war.

A while back, the late Demetrius Perricos, former important IAEA and UNMOVIC official, recounted some of his experiences as an IAEA inspector:

I started in 1972, and I started working in South and SE Asia areas, India, Vietnam, up to there, and the Far East, Korea and Japan at the time. The first inspections were in Pakistan and India systematically, and they were not very pleasant states at the time, there were health problems for the inspectors going there. But you could learn a lot at the time, you could learn to face difficulties, from solving problems of how to develop your surveillance films – you had to use the toilet, sit on the seat to have complete dark to have the film developed in the dark. You had to fight with scorpions and snakes – when you are staying in the areas near the reactors – but you learned a lot – how to negotiate with the people, how to discuss with them, they were not easy, but you had to be very careful.

Not sure how well the link is working.

There are many non-hippie songs about nuclear weapons. Here’s one:

Now that I can sorta breathe again, I’m recapitulating this post because I think it’s perhaps taken on new relevance.

Iran’s current FM Javad Zarif co-authored an article about Iran’s experience with the CWC which was published in the 1999-2000 issue of the Iranian Journal of International Affairs. At the time, I said that I didn’t know what Zarif was doing and I can’t say I anticipated that he’d be in his current line of work.

Anyway, these authors argued that Iran gave up its chemical weapons program partly because “Iranian religious leadership found it very difficult to condone the use of these weapons, even as reprisal.”This strikes me as important because Iranian officials, were, well before the recent controversy broke out over Iran’s nuclear program, referencing Islamic prohibitions against the use of unconventional weapons. Perhaps this bolsters the credibility of Iran’s fatwa regarding nuclear weapons.

It’s also worth noting that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini “issued a fatwa (religious edict) during the Iran-Iraq war prohibiting the production and use of chemical weapons in retaliation against Saddam Hussein’s forces.”

Whether Iran ever actually developed chemical weapons is not entirely clear to me, although there are certainly reports to that effect. Iran “got the chemical capabilities,” late during the Iran-Iraq war, according to this 2003 statement.

Wasn’t on my radar, I have to say. The Nobel Committee’s announcement is here; the OPCW statement is on their front page. I was going to point out that the Nobel committee has previously recognized efforts to control weapons, but they beat me to it:

Disarmament figures prominently in Alfred Nobel’s will. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has through numerous prizes underlined the need to do away with nuclear weapons. By means of the present award to the OPCW, the Committee is seeking to contribute to the elimination of chemical weapons.

Here’s the full text of Nobel’s will. The relevant part reads:

The whole of my remaining realizable estate shall be dealt with in the following way: the capital, invested in safe securities by my executors, shall constitute a fund, the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind. The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts…one part to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.