Nuclear Bombs | featured news

WASHINGTON — In a move Democrats denounced as trying to sabotage the Obama administration’s foreign policy, Sen. Rob Portman and 46 other Senate Republicans yesterday warned Iran’s leadership that any agreement to limit Tehran’s apparent efforts to build a nuclear bomb would need Senate approval to stay in effect beyond 2016.

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.

In what would be a significant concession, Obama administration officials say they could support allowing Iran to maintain a crucial element of its disputed nuclear program if Tehran took other major steps to curb its ability to develop a nuclear bomb.

The last of the nation's most powerful nuclear bombs -- a weapon hundreds of times stronger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima -- is being disassembled nearly half a century after it was put into service at the height of the Cold War.

Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency believes Iran is capable of producing and testing an atomic bomb within six months, much sooner than most analysts estimate, according to a report in German weekly Stern.

More on IranIran has now built up a stockpile of enough enriched uranium for one nuclear bomb, United Nations officials acknowledged on Thursday.

In a development that comes as the Obama administration is drawing up its policy on negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear programme, UN officials said Iran had produced more nuclear material than previously thought.