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:

As readers probably know, the State Dept’s 2019 CWC compliance report states that Iran transferred “CW to Libya during the 1978-1987 Libya-Chad war.”

Here’s some more detail:

The United States assesses that in 1987 Iran transferred CW munitions to Libya during the 1978-1987 Libya-Chad war. Following the collapse of the Gaddafi regime, the Libyan Transitional National Council located sulfur mustard-filled 130mm artillery shells and aerial bombs, which are assessed to have originated from Iran in the late 1980s. In 2011, Libya declared to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) that it discovered 517 artillery shells and 8 aerial bombs comprising 1.3 Metric Tons of sulfur mustard but did not address the provenance of the items. 

Well, the CIA was on this a while back. The 1988 report (which I cited here) mentions the transfer at least a couple of times. The report first observes that Iran’s CW production capability and stockpile were “sufficient to permit the shipment of chemical weapons to Libya in 1987.” It later mentions that “Iranian-produced chemical weapons have been transferred to Libya.”

I have always been struck by the fact that the CWC entered into force less than a decade after the Iran-Iraq war ended. This 1988 CIA report seems pretty pessimistic about the convention:

It’s perfectly fair to describe the international response as “limited.” The document earlier notes the increased incentive for CW acquisition:

But such proliferation didn’t happen. Instead, no more countries used CW until Syria did. And most states are parties to the CWC.

I thought I’d bookend this post by nothing that, according to the final document from this past November’s Ottawa Convention RevCon,

There are now three States Parties for which the obligation to destroy stockpiled anti-personnel mines remains relevant – Greece, Sri Lanka and Ukraine – with two of these States Parties being noncompliant since 1 March 2008 (Greece) and 1 June 2010 (Ukraine).

…

Since the Third Review Conference, one of the main challenges in stockpile destruction has been the pending completion of stockpile destruction by Greece and Ukraine. Both of these States Parties have reported progress in destroying their stockpiled anti-personnel mines and have provided an expected end date for implementation.