Nuclear Arms

The UN nuclear watchdog's board on Thursday condemned Iran for failing to cooperate fully with the agency, the second time it has done so in just five months. The International Atomic Energy Agency also called on Tehran to provide answers in a long-running investigation into uranium particles found at two locations that Tehran has failed to declare as nuclear sites. Nineteen members of the IAEA broad voted for the resolution, while Russia, China and Burkina Faso opposed it, and 12 abstained and one did not vote, according to diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the outcome of the closed-doors vote. The resolution was put forward by France, Germany and Britain, supported by the United States. It comes at a critical time, ahead of Donald Trump's return to the White House. Trump's first term in office was marked by a particularly tense period with Iran, when the US president pursued a policy of maximum pressure against Tehran. In 2018, Trump unilaterally withdrew

Russia says the plant has been repeatedly attacked by Ukrainian forces that are just 40 km (25 miles) away after carving out a slice of Russian territory this month

The Kursk Nuclear Power Plant has been thrust onto the front line of the war between Russia and Ukraine after an incursion by Kyiv's forces placed them within artillery range

Russian President Vladimir Putin has escalated tensions by threatening to arm North Korea in response to US and allied support for Ukraine

Global military spending on nuclear arsenals surged by 33% over the past five years, reaching $91 billion in 2023

Mutually assured destruction is the cornerstone of strategies to prevent nuclear war, but the leaders in charge of the codes hardly inspire confidence

The third meeting of the Nuclear Consultative Group (NCG) is designed to follow up on last year's summit

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un supervised salvo launches of the country's super-large multiple rocket launchers that simulated a nuclear counterattack against enemy targets, state media said Tuesday, adding to tests and threats that have raised tensions in the region. The report by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency came a day after the South Korean and Japanese militaries detected the North firing what they suspected were multiple short-range ballistic missiles from a region near its capital, Pyongyang, toward its eastern seas. Analysts say North Korea's large-sized artillery rockets blur the boundary between artillery systems and ballistic missiles because they can create their own thrust and are guided during delivery. The North has described some of these systems, including the 600mm multiple rocket launchers that were tested Monday, as capable of delivering tactical nuclear warheads. KCNA said Monday's launches represented the first demonstration of the country

Russia's top diplomat dismissed the United States proposal to resume a dialogue on nuclear arms control, saying Thursday that it's impossible while Washington offers military support to Ukraine. Speaking at an annual news conference, Sergey Lavrov accused the West of fuelling global security risks by encouraging Ukraine to ramp up strikes on the Russian territory and warned that Moscow will achieve its goals in the conflict regardless of Western support for Kyiv. Commenting on a US proposal to resume contacts in the sphere of nuclear arms control, Lavrov said that Moscow has rejected the offer. He said that for such talks to be held, Washington first needs to revise its current policy toward Russia. Lavrov charged that Washington's push for the revival of nuclear talks has been driven by a desire to resume inspections of Russia's nuclear weapons sites. He described such US demands as indecent in view of Ukraine's attacks on Russian nuclear-capable bomber bases during the ...

South Korea's president says he'll tell world leaders about the need to faithfully enforce U.N. sanctions on North Korea and block the country's illicit activities to fund its weapons programmes when they converge in Indonesia and India for annual summits this week. President Yoon Suk Yeol is to visit Jakarta for four days starting Tuesday to attend a series of summits scheduled on the margins of a meeting of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders. On Friday, he'll travel on to New Delhi for a summit of the leading rich and developing nations. At the upcoming ASEAN-related Summits and the G20 Summit, I intend to urge the international community to resolutely respond to North Korea's ever-escalating missile provocations and nuclear threats and to work closely together on its denuclearization, Yoon said in written responses to questions from The Associated Press. As long as the U.N. Security Council sanctions currently in place are faithfully implemented, North Korea's

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To this, the US government says there is no indication that the Kremlin plans to use nuclear weapons to attack Ukraine

The White House is ready to have talks with Russia without preconditions about a future nuclear arms control framework even as it is enacting countermeasures in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to suspend the last nuclear arms control treaty between the two countries. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan will make clear the Biden administration's desire for talks on building a new framework during an address to the Arms Control Association on Friday, according to two senior administration officials who previewed the address on the condition of anonymity. Putin announced in February he was suspending Russia's cooperation with the New START Treaty's provisions for nuclear warhead and missile inspections amid deep tensions between Washington and Moscow over Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Russia, however, said it would respect the treaty's caps on nuclear weapons. The officials said that Sullivan would underscore that the U.S. remains committ

His arrest earlier this week, which sparked deadly unrest in the nuclear-armed nation, was ruled "invalid and unlawful" by the Supreme Court on Thursday

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has called for his nuclear scientists to increase production of weapons-grade material to make bombs to put on his increasing range of weapons. The report in state media on Tuesday followed a series of missile launches seven launch events in this month alone and rising threats to use the weapons against his enemies. North Korea's weapons tests and US-South Korea military exercises have intensified in a tit-for-tat cycle, underscoring heightened tensions in the region. Officials say North Korea could further up the ante in coming weeks or months with more provocative displays of its military nuclear program, possibly including its first test detonation of a nuclear device since September 2017. The Korean Central News Agency said Kim during a meeting on Monday with officials and scientists at a state nuclear weapons institute stressed the need to ramp up bomb fuel production to meet his goals to expand his nuclear arsenal exponentially, and issued ..

Russia's refusal to allow on-the-ground inspections to resume is endangering the New START nuclear treaty and US-Russian arms control overall, the Biden administration charged on Tuesday. The finding was delivered to Congress and summarized in a statement by the State Department. It follows months of more hopeful US assessments that the two countries would be able to salvage cooperation on limiting strategic nuclear weapons despite high tensions over Russia's war on Ukraine. Inspections of US and Russian military sites under the New START treaty were paused by both sides because of the spread of the coronavirus in March 2020. The US-Russia committee overseeing implementation of the treaty last met in October 2021, but Russia then unilaterally suspended its cooperation with the treaty's inspection provisions in August 2022 to protest US support for Ukraine. "Russia's refusal to facilitate inspection activities prevents the United States from exercising important rights under the trea

The United States and Russia will soon hold talks on resuming suspended nuclear arms control inspections that had been put on hold during the COVID-19 pandemic and languished after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the State Department said Tuesday. State Department spokesman Ned Price said negotiations on the inspections would take place in the near future under the terms of the New START treaty and would not include any discussion of the conflict in Ukraine. He would not give a date or a venue for the talks but other officials suggested they would be held before the end of the year, likely in Egypt. The meeting of the treaty's so-called Bilateral Consultative Commission will be the first in more than a year, and is intended to show that the two countries remain committed to arms control and keeping lines of communication open despite other differences. We believe deeply around the world in the transformative power and the importance of diplomacy and dialogue, Price told reporters in

Five billion people would die in a modern nuclear war with the impact of a global famine, likely to far exceed the casualties caused by lethal blasts, a new study showed

Hiroshima remembered the atomic bombing 77 years ago as officials warned against nuclear weapons buildup and as fears grow of another such attack amid Russia's war on Ukraine

Kim has been stepping up his provocations this year while US attention has been diverted toward Russia's invasion of Ukraine by firing off a record number of ballistic missiles