Nuclear Disarmament, Iran Nuclear Weapon | 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.

Iran said on Tuesday it would stop oil exports if pressure from Western sanctions got any tighter and it had a “Plan B” contingency strategy to survive without oil revenues.

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.