Last month, IPFM blogged about this March report from India’s Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science & Technology, Environment, Forests and Climate Change. IPFM rightly focused on the portion of the report concerning delays in India’s PFBR program.

I would recommend their post, but I was struck by this observation about Indian nuclear power post the U.S.-India 123:

3.3 The Committee is also aware of the fact that apart from helping India acquire badly needed natural uranium from other countries, the Indo-US Nuclear Agreement of 2005 has not yet resulted in new commercial projects with foreign assistance. Negotiations with the French and American companies have been going on for over a decade. The Committee feels that at this point of time it would be better for the DAE to adopt a standardised 700 MW heavy-water reactor and use that standardised design for its expansion programme in an aggressive manner.

The plan for the day
will be swift as the lightning they harness
The atom display is not mindless illusion
At master control, assessment will not
Be by humans-There’s no turning back

I have seen some accounts from (George W.) Bush administration officials of Israel’s 2007 strike on the nuclear reactor under construction in Syria. But Ehud Baraks’ account in his 2018 book My Country, My Life: Fighting for Israel, Searching for Peace is the most detailed (only?) account from an Israeli official that I have seen. The tale is basically told on pages 621-23 of the ebook edition that I own. But this is a great summary paragraph:

“We struck just after midnight, in an intricately coordinated air raid that evaded not only a Syrian response, but Syrian notice. The reactor was destroyed. Although even today some details remain subject to Israel’s military secrecy regulations, accounts published abroad in the weeks and months that followed painted an accurate picture. In the aftermath of the strike, Israel deliberately made no public comment. We refused to say whether we’d had anything to do with an attack. As we’d hoped, this gave Syrian president Bashar al-Assad both the space and good reason to deny it had happened—in fact, to deny he’d been trying to make a nuclear weapon—and removed any compelling reason for him to retaliate.”

No one can escape the burning flames
The flesh and skin decay from your face
Hundred megatons lie on every soul
Destroy the human race is their goal
Destroy the weapons on this earth
Or it’s gonna be the end of the world
If they send one order death becomes alive

I love this story. In 1983, a band with a member by the name of Steve Ignorant rattled British cages by fabricating a recording between Reagan and Thatcher. The whole episode, which ended up involving the CIA and British intel, is quite funny. I am again late to the party. Nico Hines told this story a few years back in the Daily Beast and it is great. This article also has a great summary of the whole episode. This one does, too, along with a recording of the tape in question.

Here’s an excerpt:

The anarchic band [Crass] had cut the tape partly as a prank, partly to raise questions about Thatcher’s pro-nuclear, pro-war views. But it wasn’t the intelligence agencies that uncovered their part in the diplomatic incident, it was a British newspaper. The Observer outed the band behind Penis Envy and Christ the Album as the culprits in January 1984.

The Beast article mentions “secret documents [that were] were declassified in London” Those documents are here. Relevant excerpts are below. I find the transcript of confusing , but there is, of course, a nuclear weapons angle. To wit:

Anyway, the excerpts:

Thinking a bit on this post, I have to wonder why Hussein and the CIA drew different conclusions concerning the utility of chemical weapons. Recall the ISG report’s claim that Hussein regarded CW as ” vital to Iraq’s national security strategy.” The CIA report does not draw this conclusion.

The report does, however, say that “[I]f the use of chemicals continues or increases, it would be an indication to Third World states that chemical weapons have military utility.”The report does not explain how or why other governments would draw this conclusion when, as the report says, Iraq would not “gain a strategic advantage” from CW use. For me, the real question are whether – and under what circumstances – states will go to the trouble of acquiring chemical weapons.

I lack the expertise to provide a net assessment of chemical weapons’ effectiveness during the Iran-Iraq war, but are some views from the CIA and the ISG report.

This 1988 CIA report says that the weapons were not exactly decisive for Iraq:

But the 2005 ISG report explained how the value that S Hussein’s government placed on CWs:

…CW use helped the Iraqis turn back Iranian human-wave attacks when all other methods failed, buying time for Iraqi forces to regroup and replenish. Iraq again used CW successfully to help crush the popular revolt in 1991.

The report also notes that “Saddam believed Iraqi WMD capabilities had played a central role in the winning of the Iran-Iraq war and were vital to Iraq’s national security strategy.” The report provides a couple of examples:

• Iraq became the first nation to use nerve agent on the battlefield when it used Tabun against Iran in 1984. By the end of the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq had used over 100,000 chemical munitions against Iranian human wave attacks and its own Kurdish population. 
• By 1991, Iraq had amassed a sizeable CW arsenal and hundreds of tons of bulk agent. Iraq had also produced nerve agent warheads for the 650 km al-Husayn missile. 

This 1988 CIA report (the cover letter of which is signed “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!”), provides a useful summary of the intelligence signatures behind the agency’s assessment that Libya’s Rabta facility was for CW production. It also has some administrative detail about the program which I find especially interesting:

In March 2009, DOJ published this 2001 memo from then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo titled Authority of the President to Suspend Certain Provisions of the ABM Treaty. Take a look.

This rogue state/WMD/terrorism analysis was obviously big after 9/11, but it well predated that.

CIA, 1998: