Nuclear | featured news

The Senate on Friday resoundingly approved new sanctions on trade with Iran's energy, port, shipping and ship-building sectors, its latest effort to ratchet up economic pressure on Tehran over its nuclear program.

The United States set a March deadline on Thursday for Iran to start cooperating in substance with a U.N. nuclear agency investigation, saying it would otherwise urge reporting the issue to the U.N. Security Council.

Iran will go on refining uranium "with intensity" and the number of enrichment centrifuges it has operating will rise substantially in the current year, the country's nuclear energy chief was quoted as saying on Wednesday.

A diagram obtained by The Associated Press shows that Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

Iran is ready to double the output at its underground uranium enrichment facility, the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency says.

Iran is believed to have increased the number of centrifuges in an underground nuclear plant by nearly a third in three months, diplomats say, underlining the tough task facing major powers pressing Tehran to curb its atomic activity.

Iran has drawn back from its ambitions to build a nuclear weapon, Israel's defense minister was quoted as saying on Tuesday, while warning that his country may still have to decide next year whether to launch a military strike against it.

...U.S. officials say the list sends a clear warning to Iran's suppliers that the net is closing. But Frosch's ability to continue selling sensitive equipment and evade prosecution also is a cautionary tale about gaps in the U.S.-led sanctions campaign, which has sent Iran's economy into a tailspin but has yet to persuade its leaders to curb their nuclear program.

Iran followed the United States on Sunday in denying that the two countries had scheduled direct bilateral negotiations on Iran's controversial nuclear program. The New York Times, quoting unnamed U.S. administration officials, had said on Saturday that secret exchanges between U.S. and Iranian officials had yielded agreement "in principle" to hold one-on-one talks.

White House sources partly confirmed an alarming report that U.S. government computers -- reportedly including systems used by the military for nuclear commands -- were breached by Chinese hackers. “This was a spear phishing attack against an unclassified network,” a White House official told FoxNews.com. “These types of attacks are not infrequent and we have mitigation measures in place.”