Jamie Withorne of CNS wrote this piece about uranium conversion in North Korea. The whole thing is worth a read, but I would especially commend this video of then-IAEA DG Hans Blix visiting the North Korean Yongbyon facility in 1992:
Perhaps the most useful one out there for arms control/nonproliferation geeks.
This just never gets old.
This 1980 State Department cable suggests some questions relevant to devising an IAEA safeguards approach for the Osirak reactor:
This 1981 INR report describes some potential problems with responding to violations of IAEA safeguards agreements.
Interesting reading, given subsequent events.
Late to the party on this, but I thought I’d bookend this issue. This past April, the OPCW CSP decided to “suspend the following rights and privileges of the Syrian Arab Republic under the Convention: (a) to vote in the Conference and the Council; (b) to stand for election to the Council; and (c) to hold any office of the Conference, the Council, or any subsidiary organs.”
Here’s the explanation from the decision:
Recalling that in paragraph 5 of decision EC-94/DEC.2 the Council, pursuant to paragraph 36 of Article VIII of the Convention, decided to request that the Syrian Arab Republic complete certain measures within 90 days of that decision in order to redress the situation, and recalling also that in paragraph 6 of decision EC-94/DEC.2 the Council decided that the Director-General shall report to the Council and all States Parties, within 100 days of the decision, on whether the Syrian Arab Republic has completed all of the measures; and recalling further that in paragraph 7 of decision EC-94/DEC.2 the Council decided, if the Director-General reported that the Syrian Arab Republic failed to complete all of the measures set out in paragraph 5 of that decision, to recommend to the Conference to adopt a decision at its next session which undertakes appropriate action, pursuant to paragraph 2 of Article XII of the Convention, with respect to the Syrian Arab Republic;
I found this 2011 interview with Stephen Hadley recently. Here’s what he said about the absence of WMD in Iraq:
…it’s the question my daughter asked me, “Daddy, if you knew before you decided to go to war that in fact Saddam had destroyed all the stocks in WMD, would you have still gone to war?” It’s a real interesting question. My answer, which you’ll think is cop-out, is, “I don’t think the President could have.“
I think if it had been known that there weren’t stocks of WMD, I think those people who would have said try another way, play this out longer, see if there is another way to get this done, would probably have won out politically. I think it would have been very hard for the President to do it. Would that have been the right course? I think it’s very dangerous because our view was that the French and the Russians for various reasons were clearly getting ready to get rid of the sanctions. Because Saddam had basically won the public relations argument and convinced everybody that sanctions were what was impoverishing the Iraqi people, when it was in fact his decisions about how to allocate the money.
I think he would have been out from under the sanctions and I think he would have been back in the business of making weapons of mass destruction, particularly once it became clear that the Iranians were in the business of getting a nuclear weapon. The idea that Iran would be allowed to pursue its nuclear weapons and Saddam Hussein would not be developing a companion piece I think is implausible, particularly since Saddam said that the reason he didn’t tell us he didn’t have any WMDs is he was worried about the Iranians. Can you imagine what he would be doing, given [Ali] Khamenei and [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad and their nuclear program? We’d be in a nuclear arms race between Iran and Iraq.
This 1960 Air Force Report titled Plans and Policies for the Ballistic Missile Initial Operational Capability Program has a useful chronology of the US ballistic missile program: Here’s the first page:
