Not sure if these are new, but FNA published some photos on 30 December of some IR6s centrifuges.

This account from journalist and former High Commissioner of Pakistan to the UK Wajid Shamsul Hasan contains an anecdote which I had not previously read:

Like Imran Khan and former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif martyred Benazir Bhutto too was under lot of pressure in her two tenures from the Americans to recognise Israel and roll back Pakistan’s nuclear programme. I am privy to what she had been through resisting American pressure. She was overly defiant and brave to tell them almost to go to hell.

I remember in February 1999 she was offered safe passage to Pakistan, withdrawal of cases, a media blitzkrieg to write off all allegations of corruption and her return as prime minister a third time provided she agreed to nuclear roll back and Israel’s recognition.

Just a quick note about this post II wrote a little while ago about SPND and MODAFL…it wasn’t clear to me at the time that the SPND was actually part of MODAFL. I’m not sure that I saw hat fact mentioned anywhere except for this 2012 EU sanctions announcement and the 2020 State Compliance report (which describes the SPND as “subordinate to” MODAFL.) For example, the November 2011 IAEA report’s diagram seems to be ambiguous on that question.

This 1963 Australian Dept of External Affairs Policy Planning Study, titled An Examination of the Nature and Extent of Current British Economic Interests and Political and Military Commitments in South and South East Asia, their likely course over the next Ten Years, and the Implications for Australia has some interesting bits about the nuclear weapons in British foreign and defense policy. Here’s a good example:

To sum up, priority for the homeland and Europe, increasing dependence on the U.S. and the N.A.T.O. alliance, anti-nuclear sentiment in Africa and Asia, the likely contraction of bases, the decline in her relative economic and trading position, the need to reduce foreign expenditure, and continuing manpower shortages in the forces, are all factors limiting Britain’s ability to maintain an effective military presence east of Suez. She has sought to make the best of limited resources and adverse circumstances by a strategy of long-range mobile forces operating from a central reserve in the U.K. and, to date, a major theatre base in Singapore. The conventional role of those forces outside Europe is essentially that of fire brigades for small brush-fire wars; where, in fulfilment of her regional alliance commitments, it may become necessary to oppose Chinese Communist aggression, Britain would expect nuclear weapons to be used. British strategy in the Far East, therefore, is essentially one with a limited application which is likely to contract. The responsibility for the military containment of Communism in Asia is basically and increasingly one for the U.S. and the countries of the region.

All is quiet all is dead the city has melted/The sound has penetrated through our heads/ The world has ended the gas is gone/It killed the people now the mutants live on

During a 1997 Senate hearing , Robert Einhorn, then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Nonproliferation provided one of the fullest explanations I’ve seen of the transfer of ring magnets from China to Pakistan:

Mr. Einhorn. We believe it is credible that central, senior-level Chinese authorities did not know of in advance and did not approve of that transaction, and the reason why we believe that is not just because senior Chinese officials told us that. It is because of our understanding of the Chinese system and how it operates. This transaction was probably less than $70,000. Ring magnets are very unsophisticated kinds of devices. They were treated under their export control system as general commercial goods and it is very plausible, in our view, that this transaction would have been treated as a routine kind of transaction. And the more we learn about the rudimentary State of Chinese export controls on dual-use items, the more plausible it becomes that this particular transaction would have been made without high-level governmental knowledge…

I never made the connection.

The savage mutilation
Of the human race
Is set on course

Protest and survive!
Protest and survive!

This 1960 report from the Australian Joint Intelligence Committee, titled Nuclear Weapons and Guided Missiles in Communist China up to the End of 1965, states that

We believe that China intends to acquire a full range of nuclear weapons and guided missiles as soon as practicable.

and

China has indigenous sources of uranium and is capable of producing uranium metal for use as fuel in a nuclear reactor. There is, however, no evidence to date of any activity which could be directly related to nuclear weapon trial or development and there are no known facilities for substantial production of the necessary fissile material.

China has the scientific and technical ability, unaided, to produce a very limited number of nuclear weapons and, assuming that a major effort is made, a nuclear weapon programme could be in operation by 1965.

China, of course, tested a nuclear weapon in 1964.

Not really a song about nuclear weapons, but there’s this line:

They keep their fucking power cause their finger’s on the button
They’ve got control and won’t let it be forgotten

On December7, the UNGA ,”acting on the recommendation of its First Committee (Disarmament and International Security), adopted 66 resolutions and decisions today.” Here’s a long document explaining all of that.