If one studies IR theory, as I did, one tends to miss things like this. OK, perhaps I ought not generalize, but you get the point. Essentially, Greece’s count of the number of APL’s that it had destroyed was inaccurate. Now, a number of experts have composed very serious texts about compliance with international agreements. But in this case, some person (or people) didn’t load a truck properly.

In 2014, the Third Review Conference of the Ottawa Convention took place in Maputo; the next RevCon will happen later this month. During the Third RevCon, there was some discussion of the reasons behind Greece’s failure to meet the convention’s date for destroying Athens’ APL stockpiles. The mines were actually destroyed in Bulgaria; part of this discussion involved a discrepancy between Greece and Bulgaria’s accounts of destroyed Greek APLs:

In its transparency report of 2010, Greece reported that as of 31 December 2009, 1,566,532 anti-personnel mines remained to be destroyed and that 615,362 mines had been transferred to Bulgaria for the purposes of destruction. Bulgarian authorities reported that between 15 December 2008 and 14 May 2010 a total of 614,882 Greek anti-personnel mines have been delivered and destroyed in Bulgaria.

That left 480 APLs unaccounted for. What happened? Well, someone F’d up:

On 20 June 2011, Greece informed the Standing Committee on Stockpile Destruction that the investigation identified that the discrepancy in numbers was due to an uneven distribution of mines during packaging for the shipment to Bulgaria and that the 480 were indeed stored in an ammunition warehouse of the Greek army.

I’m genuinely not taking the piss here. Sometimes the mundane is entertaining.

This is obvious, but come on….

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: