More from the document about which I recently wrote:

Former OPCW DG Ahmet Üzümcü wrote this piece a couple of months ago about the Syria CW saga. Here’s his take on Syria’s 2013 accession to the CWC:

In retrospect, I think that my initial reservations were correct and it was too much of a leap of faith to jump from the “red line” trigger (U.S. President Obama’s warning that Syrian CW use would be met with consequences) to membership of the OPCW. Let me explain. I believe a progressive approach should have been adopted under which Syria should have been asked to wait until it had gotten rid of all its CW stockpiles and production capacity in a verifiable manner, and then a reasonable and quiet period allowed to elapse without any reported use of CWs. Although the CWC does not provide a basis for such a transitional arrangement, it could have been executed through a UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution. But the Director General had little influence in decision-making, for that remains the prerogative of Member States.

The piece also provides some other interesting details concerning the OPCW and Syria’s chemical weapons.

I recently discovered this Farsi-language doc about the IR-40. Not sure how much people can glean from it, but here you go.

A while ago, Doug Feith published, at the same time as his book War and Decision, this document titled, Non-WMD Declaratory Policy for Iraq. It’s worth examining an instance In which the Bush administration’s consideration of preventing WMD use in a concrete case.The problem was that Saddam Hussein would have an incentive to use WMD if he believed that the United States were about to overthrow his regime (which, of course, the Bush II administration was planning to do). For example, take a look at these: For example, take a look at these:

THere’s more, so take a look at the whole thing.

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.

An excerpt from this report describes how EURATOM and the IAEA play nicely together:

This 1980 State Department cable suggests some questions relevant to devising an IAEA safeguards approach for the Osirak reactor:

The 1981 INR report about which I wrote yesterday has this footnote on Soviet nuclear exports: