How the world's most underdeveloped nations get the world's most dangerous weapons

Technology and Culture

Volumn 48, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 92-103

  Forden, Geoffrey ^a  

^a MIT's Program in Science Technology and Society ^*  (United States)

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EID: 33847012663     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.2007.0015     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), Report: Disarmament, 29 January 1999, S/1999/94, 122.
2. A mycotoxin is any poisonous substance produced by fungi, which includes alfatoxin.
3. The Pershing II is a solid-propellant missile with increased range and accuracy that was deployed in Europe starting in 1983. This deployment is generally considered one of the major reasons why the Soviet Union negotiated and signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Importantly for Iraq, some of the Pershing II's components were made in Germany, and eventually some of the engineers from Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm who had been involved in that production left to form their own company to sell the technology abroad.
4. The SCUD family of missiles, originally developed by the Soviet Union starting in 1955, is a rugged, road-mobile, short-range (approximately 300 kilometers) liquid-propellant missile that has become ubiquitous throughout the Third World.
5. UNMOVIC, "Unresolved Disarmament Issues: Iraq's Proscribed Weapons Programmes," UNMOVIC Working Document, 6 March 2003, 21. Available at http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/new/documents/cluster_document.pdf (accessed 19 July 2006).
6. Ibid., 164.
7. Iraq Survey Group, Comprehensive Report, vol. 2, Evolution of Chemical Warfare Program, 15.
8. "Terrorist's Deadly Nerve Gas Secrets Are Revealed," Sunday Times, 5 January 1975.1 thank Brian Balmer for pointing this incident out. His account of the controversy surrounding the revelation of the V-agent patents, "A Secret Formula, a Rogue Patent and Public Knowledge about Nerve Gas: Secrecy as a Spatial-Epistemic Tool," will be published in a forthcoming issue of Social Studies of Science.
9. David Ignatius, "Iraq's Thirteen-Year Search for Deadly Chemical," Washington Post, 25 September 1988.
10. Iraq Survey Group, Comprehensive Report, vol. 3, Evolution of Chemical Warfare Program, 6.
11. Uranium hexafluoride, a chemical compound in which one uranium atom is bonded to six fluorine atoms, is used as feed material for many of the enrichment processes - including both centrifuges and gaseous diffusion plants - that separate the explosive isotope U235 from the more benign U238 that makes up roughly 99.3 percent of all naturally occurring uranium.
12. Each molecule of uranium tetrafluoride, or UF4, consists of one uranium atom and four fluorine atoms. While the United States does not use a uranium hexafluoride production path that has UF4 as an intermediary, some other countries do. Iran, for instance, uses a production path that has UF4 as an intermediary, and there is reason to believe that China does also.