• Studying War in the New Nuclear Age

    Nuclear security can be a daunting topic: The consequences seem unimaginable, but the threat is real. MIT political scientist Caitlin Talmadge scrutinizes military postures and international dynamics to understand the risks of escalation.

  • Will Trump’s Nuclear Testing Order Prompt a Global Race?

    President Donald Trump said he had ordered the Pentagon to immediately resume nuclear weapons testing “because of other countries testing programs.” But no other country has tested nuclear weapons in more than 30 years, and nuclear policy experts worry that Trump’s push may disrupt what has been a more than three-decades-long moratorium of live testing of nuclear explosives.

  • LANL Waste Containers Successfully Depressurized

    Technicians successfully completed the depressurization of four flanged tritium waste containers and moved them to a waste staging location on site. The containers were placed in temporary storage in 2007. Over the years, pressure gradually built in the containers. Alleviating that pressure was necessary to safely prepare them for eventual shipment offsite.

  • U.S. Army Taps INL’s Nuclear Expertise, Capabilities to Strengthen Radiological Response and Readiness

    The mission of the U.S. Army’s Nuclear Disablement Team (NDT) is to disable potential enemies’nuclear capabilities. INL’s experts help train NDT team members for that mission.

  • Israel Secretly Recruited Iranian Dissidents to Attack Their Country from Within

    The Mossad made Iran its top priority in 1993 after Israelis and Palestinians signed the Oslo Accords on the White House lawn, seemingly ending decades of conflict. The main goal of Israel’s focus on Iran: To protect Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the region.

  • Significance of the Targeted Nuclear Scientists in the 12-Day War

    The June 2025 war between Israel and Iran, called the 12-Day War, saw the killing y the Israeli military of many Iranian nuclear scientists who participated in or are linked to Iran’s nuclear weapons program.  the elimination of these nuclear scientists deprived Iran’s nuclear weapons program of its most capable and experienced personnel.  This act weakened Iran’s base for building nuclear weapons, eliminating needed expertise and hard-to-get management experience.

  • What Damage Did the U.S. Do to Iran’s Nuclear Program? Why It’s So Hard to Know

    Disagreements over the damage the U.S. bombing did to Iran’s nuclear facilities are unsurprising. Battle damage assessment –originally called bomb damage assessment –is notoriously difficult, and past wars have featured intense controversies among military and intelligence professionals.

  • Why the U.S. Bombed a Bunch of Metal Tubes − a Nuclear Engineer Explains the Importance of Centrifuges to Iranian Efforts to Build Nuclear Weapons

    It’s not clear what the U.S. attack has accomplished, but destroying the facilities targeted in the attack and hindering Iran’s ability to continue enriching uranium might be a way to slow Iran’s move toward producing nuclear weapons. But history shows that a more reliable means of preventing Iran from achieving its nuclear aims would be for diplomacy and cooperation to prevail.

  • Post-Attack Assessment of the First 12 Days of Israeli and U.S. Strikes on Iranian Nuclear Facilities

    Israel’s historic Operation Rising Lion and the United States Operation Midnight Hammer have targeted many Iranian nuclear sites, causing massive damage to its nuclear program and setting it back significantly. 

  • The Uncertainty in the Aftermath of the U.S. Bombing in Iran

    The U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear sites Sunday had a concrete strategic objective: thwart Iran’s ability to enrich nuclear material and potentially build nuclear weapons. It was intended to make the world a safer place. At the moment, however, the world remains a dangerous place.

  • Quote of the Day

    One thing I think that this attack signals is that there’s a big distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear states in that you can do whatever you want to a non-nuclear state. It would be much harder if Iran actually had a nuclear program…. Once you get nuclear weapons, it’s really hard for anybody to come and overturn your regime…. And so there’s going to be all these long-run consequences that aren’t going to be necessarily so pretty, meaning that a lot of countries are going to see this as a signal that they need to get serious about their own separate nuclear deterrence.

    — Francis Fukuyama, interviewed by Yascha Mounk, Persuasion, 25 June 1925

  • Targeting Nuclear Scientists

    The killing of Iranian nuclear scientists has been an integral part of Israel’s campaign, stretching back more than two decades, to disrupt and derail Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The 14 Iranian scientists killed on and since 13 June were all leading members of the Iran’s nuclear weaponization group.

  • Nuclear Scientists  Have Long Been Targets in Covert Ops – Israel Has Brought That Policy Out of the Shadows

    Since 1944, there have been at least 100 instances of what researchers call nuclear “scientist targeting.” The most recent example are the 14 senior Iranian nuclear scientists Israel killed on 13 June as part of the opening move of its surprise attack on Iran, in which Israel has also decapitated the Iranian military, intelligence services, and Revolutionary Guard by killing practically all of these organizations’ leaders and senior officers – several dozen in all. In the week since the attack was launched, Israel has killed three more Iranian nuclear scientists.

  • How Might Israel Attack Iran’s Underground Nuclear Plant? A 2024 Raid in Syria Could e a Template

    One of the key elements of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program is the uranium enrichment plant at Fordow, where about 5,000 centrifuges operate in an underground centrifuge farm 80 meters below ground. Israel may find it difficult to destroy the facility in an aerial attack — it does not have the U.S.-made 30,000lb GBU-57 MOP (massive ordnance penetrator) or the planes to carry this munition. But it may decide to destroy Fordow in a daring ground attack, similar to the one it conducted in Syria on 8 September 2024, in which Israeli commandoes destroyed an underground Syrian missile production facility.

  • Analysis of the IAEA’s Comprehensive Iran NPT Safeguards Report May 2025

    The Trump administration’s 2018 decision to unilaterally withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran was a gift to Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions, freeing Iran from that deal’s tight restrictions on developing nuclear weapons – a freedom which Iran has used to accelerate, unhindered, its rush toward the bomb. But Iran is still a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which bars member states from developing nuclear weapons. The recent IAEA report notes that Iran is in egregious violation of its NPT obligations, and that it has been engaging in an elaborate, ongoing cover-up of its nuclear weapons-related activities.