Iran, Iran Nuclear Weapon | featured news

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.

Iran will present a new advance in its atomic program Wednesday by loading domestically made nuclear fuel into a research reactor in the capital Tehran, a senior Iranian official told a Russian news agency Tuesday.

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Sunday that Iran is only one year away from producing a nuclear weapon. In an interview on the CBS show "60 Minutes," Panetta said that “the consensus is that, if they decided to do it, it would probably take them about a year to be able to produce a bomb and then possibly another one to two years in order to put it on a deliverable vehicle of some sort in order to deliver that weapon.”

The U.N. Security Council is set to impose a new round of sanctions on a defiant Iran on Wednesday over a nuclear program that Western powers suspect is aimed at developing atomic weapons.

Big power envoys were to meet on Wednesday to pursue the quest for fresh U.N. sanctions to try to halt Iran's nuclear program, but diplomats forecast weeks of haggling over a text the Security Council can pass.

Iran began enriching uranium to a level at which it can sustain a nuclear reaction before United Nations inspectors arrived to monitor the process, and in defiance of a specific request that it not so do, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said Thursday.