I recently posted some speeches by former Pakistani officials associated with that country’s nuclear weapons program. I thought I’d put them all in one place:

Re-upping this one. A while back, an NYRB piece about Alan Turing, whom the author identifies as “the man who…had originally worked out the possibility of a universal computer.” The advent of said computer is, of course, of interest to nuclear weapons geeks:

The digital universe came into existence, physically speaking, late in 1950, in Princeton, New Jersey, at the end of Olden Lane. That was when and where the first genuine computer—a high-speed, stored-program, all-purpose digital-reckoning device—stirred into action. It had been wired together, largely out of military surplus components, in a one-story cement-block building that the Institute for Advanced Study had constructed for the purpose. The new machine was dubbed MANIAC, an acronym of “mathematical and numerical integrator and computer.”

And what was MANIAC used for, once it was up and running? Its first job was to do the calculations necessary to engineer the prototype of the hydrogen bomb. Those calculations were successful. On the morning of November 1, 1952, the bomb they made possible, nicknamed “Ivy Mike,” was secretly detonated over a South Pacific island called Elugelab. The blast vaporized the entire island, along with 80 million tons of coral. One of the air force planes sent in to sample the mushroom cloud—reported to be “like the inside of a red-hot furnace”—spun out of control and crashed into the sea; the pilot’s body was never found. A marine biologist on the scene recalled that a week after the H-bomb test he was still finding terns with their feathers blackened and scorched, and fish whose “skin was missing from a side as if they had been dropped in a hot pan.”

A more recent issue of the Review had an exchange about who was actually responsible for creating the first computer. I am far from qualified to evaluate it, but enjoy.

Almost 10 years ago, the NYRB blog hosted a debate about nuclear deterrence. There are lots of great names here, but I especially like this line from Jeremy Bernstein:

The notion of having an “independent deterrent” may sound sensible until one looks into what in the British case this actually is: one submarine wandering around submerged. When I read about this I kept thinking of the Beatles song, “We all live in a yellow submarine.”

Pakistani Air Commodore (Retd) Khalid Banuri spoke about India and nuclear weapons last autumn at CISS:

So U.S. Ambassador Wolcott made this statement to the BoG which added some detail to IAEA DG Grossi’s March 3 report on Iran’s CSA compliance. I’m referring to the report’s section about the agency’s investigation of possible undeclared activities.

Here’s the section in question:

Regarding the first bullet, Wolcott stated that “the nuclear material in question may potentially be uranium metal.” With respect to the second bullet, the “nuclear-related activities” are “potentially related to uranium conversion.”

Oh, Wolcott also noted that “[I]t is widely recognized that Iran had a nuclear weapons program until 2003.”

The EEAS has a helpful post containing the EU’s statements from the recent IAEA BoG meeting.

Here are the Iran-related statements:

EU Statement on Verification and monitoring in the Islamic Republic of Iran in light of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2231 (2015)

EU Statement on NPT Safeguards Agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran

Bonus: EU Statement on Implementation of the NPT safeguards agreement in the Syrian
Arab Republic

The nuclear war announces the end of the world/The mankind is buried and forgotten/Prophets forsee the doom/They forsee the triumph of your death

A little while back, I discussed a CIA account of an episode concerning Yugoslavia’s offensive CW program. Well, this 1993 NIE, titled “Combatant Forces in the Former Yugoslavia” has an annex titled “Chemical Warfare Capabilities.”

Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1952, Volume 1, Policy Making, by Margaret Gowing and Lorna Arnold has an excerpt concerning the GEN 163 committee that I discussed in this post:

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OK, this is hardly exhaustive, but I was reading this NYRB piece (sub. req.) titled “The Mouse That Roared,” which is a review of a book about former British PM Clement Attlee. Most of the article has nothing to do with WMD, but I read this paragraph with interest:

At the end of the war, Attlee took a strong line in favor of dismembering the German state, even if he stopped short of Henry Morgenthau’s plan for “pastoralizing” the country. He wholeheartedly supported Truman on the dropping of the atomic bomb and instantly concluded that Britain must have atomic weapons of its own and be prepared to use them. Fearful that his Labour colleagues might not support him, he set up a secret Cabinet committee, GEN 163, to authorize work to begin before any objections could be raised. The committee met only once, on January 8, 1947, and its decisions were not communicated to the Cabinet, then or later. Similarly, neither Cabinet nor Parliament got to hear of Attlee’s agreement with James Forrestal, the US secretary of defense, to station three groups of large bombers on British soil.

This UK Govt fact sheet explains that

Wartime UK-US nuclear collaboration was brought to an end by the 1946 US Energy Act (the McMahon Act), following which, in 1947, the Attlee Government decided to resume an independent UK programme to develop an atomic weapon. The UK successfully tested its first atomic bomb in October 1952.

A chapter in this 2001 report cites a record of the 1947 meeting:

There is a record of that meeting in the UK National Archives, but it seems not to be available online: