The Departments of State and Treasury, as well as the U.S. Coast Guard, recently issued a Sanctions Advisory for the Maritime Industry, Energy and Metals Sectors, and Related Communities.

The advisory has lots of weedy stuff about sanctions evasion, as this excerpt indicates:

This advisory discusses sanctions risks and contains information on common deceptive shipping practices and general approaches to aid in further tailoring due diligence and sanctions compliance policies and procedures. It is intended primarily to provide guidance to the following: ship owners, managers, operators, brokers, ship chandlers, flag registries, port operators, shipping companies, freight forwarders, classification service providers, commodity traders, insurance companies, and financial institutions.1,2 This advisory includes both updated information on the deceptive practices used to evade sanctions and policies and procedures that entities operating in the specific maritime sectors enumerated above may wish to consider adopting as part of a risk-based sanctions compliance program.

There’s also specific information about sanctions and Iran, North Korea, and Syria. There’s also this interesting NK graphic:

This was pretty funny:

Dear #ArmsTradeTreaty #ATT, congratulations on today’s signature! Best of luck in getting the ratification. Yours, #CTBT

— CTBTO (@ctbto_alerts) September 26, 2013

I can’t say I was looking for it, but here it is.

This was a rare moment of levity back when:

Speaking exclusively to the Guardian from his 31st floor office at the UN in New York, Mr Blix said: “I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media. Not that I cared very much.”

I suspect that many nerds already know this, but here’s a data point from the document about which I blogged yesterday:

The Soviets have a wide variety of tactical nuclear weapons. The number of nuclear capable and potentially nuclear-capable artillery cannons has increased by well over a factor of ten in the last decade.

Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda place the number of Soviet TNWs at “13,000–22,000 in the late-1980s.”

Here’s the 1991 DOD Memorandum for Secretaries of the Military Departments: Reducing the United States Nuclear Arsenal, September 28 1991.

Here’s a slide:

Ambassador Susan Rice writes the following in Tough Love:

The IAEA reported [n 2009] that Iran had enriched some uranium to 20 percent (close to bomb-grade quality) and continued working on warhead designs far longer than previously suspected.

I didn’t understand this reference, so I consulted the the IAEA DG reports from 2009:

November, August, June, February.

Having done so, I still don’t understand the reference. The IAEA was investigating possible Iranian work on RV’s in 2009, but it had been doing so since at least 2005. Even if her claim were true, it seems irrelevant…Rice doesn’t explain whether and to what extent this information impacted the IC’s 2007 assessment that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program.

The 10th anniversary of the Tehran Declaration took place a few days ago. Man, has that been put down the memory hole.

I extracted it from the file mentioned here. Download it below.

The history of the UK’s thermonuclear weapons program about which I blogged the other day repeatedly mentions a 1955 paper updating the 1950 version the 1957 edition of The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. Much of the discussion concerns potential UK H-Bomb tests.