I don’t recall reading this before. From this NYRB article by Elizabeth Kolbert:

What is often called “the first use of weapons of mass destruction” took place on April 22, 1915, near the town of Ypres, in western Belgium. Six months earlier, Germany’s hopes for a quick victory in World War I had been dashed on the banks of the Marne, and the country had enlisted some of its top scientists to break the stalemate. One of them, Fritz Haber, the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry, had suggested releasing chlorine gas. Since the gas is heavier than air, Haber reasoned, it would sink when released; this would allow it to infiltrate the trenches of the French and English forces.

The Germans had signed the Hague Convention of 1899, which forbade the “use of projectiles the sole object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases.” Nevertheless, by interpreting this clause literally—the chlorine would be released not from projectiles but from canisters—the country’s military commanders managed to convince themselves that the move was permissible.

In the same interview that I cited the other day, Herbert York also mentioned this fact about thermonuclear weapons:

The simple fact is every hydrogen bomb there is was invented by, was based on technology fully known by 1960. There hasn’t been anything in 50 years that matters. Some of the ideas from 1960 didn’t get made until 1970, but there’s nothing new. It’s a totally mature thing. The only things that are like new are like modem refrigerators are better than they were 20 years ago, they’re still the same thing. They’ve got better hinges, more space on the door…

Of Course I Fucking Did.

In this interview with Alex Wellerstein, Herbert York says a bit about what the U.S. government learned about Israel’s nuclear weapons from Vanunu:

WELLERSTEIN asks whether classification caused technical difficulties. “No, well, no, I don’t think so. At least, I never thought it did. It’s always possible that if we could actually go back in time we might find something, but, because we did have very tight control of the shops, and again, I thought some of that was overdone. For example, in those days — it’s no longer true — but in those days, spherical symmetry was nearly everywhere. The primaries were always spherically symmetrical. And so anything so anything, any shell of metal that was spherical in shape, was highly classified. But of course, it’s like my discovering plutonium, this guy from Israel, from Dimona [Mordechai Vanunu], he brought out with him either the shapes or the lot of dimensions that he gave to the British and then we call got, which told us a lot, even those spheres are not classified, we learned a lot about the first Israeli bombs from just the drawings of shapes, the same thing from the Soviets. … Vanunu is still an issue, it’s amazing. And it’s a secrecy issue!”

The Newsletter for Nominated Experts and Analytical Laboratories for the Secretary-General’s Mechanism for the Alleged Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons reminds us that

Under the current UNSGM guidelines, investigations took place in Mozambique and Azerbaijan in 1992.

Here’ are the conclusions of the Mozambique investigation:

Here‘ are the conclusions of the Azerbaijan investigation:

Via UNIDIR’s depository of MEWMDFZ documents, I found this 1958 Soviet Proposal to Create A Middle East Zone Free of Nuclear Weapons. Here’s a key excerpt:

The Near and Middle East should and can become a zone of peace, where there are no, and should not be, nuclear weapons and missiles, a zone of good neighbourliness and friendly cooperation between states. The organisers of the Baghdad bloc are trying to prevent this, as indicated during a session of the Council of the Baghdad Pact in Ankara. In connection with the above, the leadership of the Soviet Union considers it necessary to draw the attention of the governments of countries participating in the Baghdad Pact to the fact that all responsibility for such a policy and the consequences arising from it falls on the US government, as well as on the leadership of those countries participating in this bloc that follow the policy of foreign imperialists.

Robert Carlin recently wrote a good piece about KEDO, which implemented key parts of the Agreed Framework. The whole thing is worth a read, but this part particularly struck me:

The biggest surprise of all in KEDO’s New York headquarters came when in September 2005, we learned that Ambassador Christopher Hill, at the very meeting finalizing the Six Party Joint Statement, had announced that “the United States supports a decision to terminate KEDO by the end of the year.” Jaws dropped open.

<snip> [this feels really ~2005]

There had been no coordination, no warning from Washington this statement was coming, and thus no opportunity to prepare the ground ahead of time with the North Koreans. We still had workers at the site. We were still reviewing evacuation plans. And now, we had been left hanging.

Here’s the Urdu version of the BBC interview with AQ Khan that I mentioned here. I do not have a translation.

For no particular reason, here’s the Fall 1979 issue of the Journal of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management.

Here’s the table of contents. Plus ca change and all that.

I did not know this existed.