Nuclear Weapon | featured news

North Korea has made significant progress in the construction of a light water atomic reactor over the past year, a U.N. watchdog report said, a facility that may extend Pyongyang's capacity to produce material for nuclear weapons.

Our expert panel gauges the odds that the United States or Israel will strike the Islamic Republic in the next year. The probability of conflict with Iran is now at 40 percent, according to The Atlantic's Iran War Dial.

Iran has doubled the number of uranium enrichment machines it has in an underground bunker, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Thursday, showing Tehran's defiance towards Western pressure to stop its atomic work and the threat of Israeli attack.

The United Nations' nuclear watchdog has set up a specialized Iran Task Force to handle its inspections and investigation of the Islamic state's disputed atomic activities, an internal document showed on Wednesday.

Iran said on Tuesday it has no plans to show its nuclear sites to diplomats visiting Tehran for this week's Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit, despite an earlier offer by a deputy foreign minister.

For months senior Israeli officials have said the "window of opportunity" for attacking Iran's nuclear facilities is "before the U.S. presidential election in November" because Iran's nuclear facilities will soon be in fortified underground bunkers out of the reach of Israeli bombs. But former CIA analyst Ray McGovern believes that delaying Iran's nuclear capabilities is not the primary concern of a military strike, but simply the pretext.

Iran has stepped up work to develop a nuclear warhead, Israeli newspapers said on Sunday, citing officials in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government and leaked U.S. intelligence.

The U.S. government's only facility for handling, processing and storing weapons-grade uranium has been temporarily shut after anti-nuclear activists, including an 82-year-old nun, breached security fences, government officials said on Thursday.

Congress is pressing ahead with a new package of crippling sanctions on Iran, expanding on financial penalties and targeting Tehran's energy and shipping sectors in the hope that economic pressure undercuts its suspected nuclear weapons program....

A contentious debate over nuclear power in Japan is also bringing another question out of the shadows: Should Japan keep open the possibility of making nuclear weapons - even if only as an option?...