Latest news with #proliferation
Sky News
9 hours ago
- Politics
- Sky News
Israel-Iran live: Iran executes three men accused of spying for Israel - as Trump rejects US intel on nuclear sites
Explained: Where are Iran's nuclear facilities? Donald Trump has been praising US strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities - but intelligence suggests the destruction may not have been emphatic as he claims. In fact, the attacks may have just set the programme back by months, rather than eliminated it entirely - see our post at 21.16. As a reminder, this map shows the key nuclear locations - and we'll be going through each one. For context, we use the term nuclear proliferation a lot below, so here's the definition: The spread of nuclear weapons, and, more generally, the spread of nuclear technology and knowledge that might be put to military use. Nuclear proliferation is controlled by the Nuclear Non‐proliferation Treaty, which recognises five nuclear states: the US, the UK, Russia, China and France. Oxford Reference Natanz One of Iran's principal uranium enrichment complexes lies on a plain adjacent to mountains outside the Shiite Muslim holy city of Qom, south of Tehran. Natanz houses facilities including two enrichment plants: the vast, underground Fuel Enrichment Plant and the above-ground Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant. It was revealed in 2002 that Iran was secretly building the facility, which is said to be three floors underground. Fordow Another enrichment site can be found at Fordow - one that is extremely well protected, given that it's thought to be dug into the side of a mountain. Isfahan Iran's second-biggest city is home to a large nuclear technology centre, which includes a Fuel Plate Fabrication Plant and a uranium conversion facility. There is equipment at Isfahan to make uranium metal, a process that is particularly proliferation-sensitive since it can be used to create the core of a nuclear bomb. Khondab In Khondab lies a partially built heavy-water research reactor. These pose a nuclear proliferation risk because they can produce plutonium which, like enriched uranium, can be used to make the core of an atom bomb. Iran has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that it plans to bring the reactor online in 2026, with a previous 2015 deal seeing the reactor's core removed and filled with concrete to make it unusable. Tehran Iran's nuclear research facilities in its capital Tehran include a research reactor. Bushehr Iran's only operating nuclear power plant lies in the Bushehr area on the Gulf coast. The facility uses Russian fuel that Moscow then takes back when it is spent, therefore reducing the proliferation risk.
Sky News
10 hours ago
- Politics
- Sky News
Iran executes three men accused of spying for Israel - as Trump rejects US intel on nuclear sites
Explained: Where are Iran's nuclear facilities? Donald Trump has been praising US strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities - but intelligence suggests the destruction may not have been emphatic as he claims. In fact, the attacks may have just set the programme back by months, rather than eliminated it entirely - see our post at 21.16. As a reminder, this map shows the key nuclear locations - and we'll be going through each one. For context, we use the term nuclear proliferation a lot below, so here's the definition: The spread of nuclear weapons, and, more generally, the spread of nuclear technology and knowledge that might be put to military use. Nuclear proliferation is controlled by the Nuclear Non‐proliferation Treaty, which recognises five nuclear states: the US, the UK, Russia, China and France. Oxford Reference Natanz One of Iran's principal uranium enrichment complexes lies on a plain adjacent to mountains outside the Shiite Muslim holy city of Qom, south of Tehran. Natanz houses facilities including two enrichment plants: the vast, underground Fuel Enrichment Plant and the above-ground Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant. It was revealed in 2002 that Iran was secretly building the facility, which is said to be three floors underground. Fordow Another enrichment site can be found at Fordow - one that is extremely well protected, given that it's thought to be dug into the side of a mountain. Isfahan Iran's second-biggest city is home to a large nuclear technology centre, which includes a Fuel Plate Fabrication Plant and a uranium conversion facility. There is equipment at Isfahan to make uranium metal, a process that is particularly proliferation-sensitive since it can be used to create the core of a nuclear bomb. Khondab In Khondab lies a partially built heavy-water research reactor. These pose a nuclear proliferation risk because they can produce plutonium which, like enriched uranium, can be used to make the core of an atom bomb. Iran has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that it plans to bring the reactor online in 2026, with a previous 2015 deal seeing the reactor's core removed and filled with concrete to make it unusable. Tehran Iran's nuclear research facilities in its capital Tehran include a research reactor. Bushehr Iran's only operating nuclear power plant lies in the Bushehr area on the Gulf coast. The facility uses Russian fuel that Moscow then takes back when it is spent, therefore reducing the proliferation risk.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
As the US chooses destruction over diplomacy in Iran, Australia has to decide between principle and prostration
The bully of the Middle East, as President Trump called Iran, has had its nuclear enrichment facilities bombed by the world's premier bully. The irony is not lost on anyone, except perhaps Australia. In an especially anodyne statement, a spokesperson for the Australian government echoed American claims that 'Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile program has been a threat to international peace and security', and backed in Trump's admonition that 'now is the time for peace'. Little Sir Echo whimpers again, this time through a mouthpiece. Steering a careful course between the prevention of nuclear proliferation and full-throated endorsement for attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, the government has now said Australia supports the US strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, maintaining that Iran must not be allowed to possess atomic weapons. 'The world has long understood we cannot allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. This action is being taken to prevent that. So, we support action to prevent Iran getting a nuclear weapon,' the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, said. For all their sermonising and sanctimonious moralising, successive Australian governments are selective in their advocacy and support for the 'international rules-based order'. The rules really matter when Russia attacks Ukraine. They don't seem to matter as much when America launches a massive 'shock and awe' airstrike against Iraq, as it did in 2003, or assembles 125 bombers and supporting aircraft to obliterate alleged strategic targets across Iran, as it did just two days ago. The UN Charter established a new international constitutional order after the appalling genocides and slaughter of the second world war. It ordained that security is a function of law – law based on the axiomatic proposition that human beings have value and dignity by virtue of their shared humanity. Agreements, conventions, treaties and a variety of other instruments enshrine the rules to which nations adhere that value fundamental human and political rights as the bedrock for both prosperity and security. There's not much of either in the Middle East right now. Nor is there much legality. Claims of 'clear and present danger' are easy to make. They are significantly more difficult to prove, as President George W Bush discovered in 2003, and as the US director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, and President Trump have demonstrated once again. Faith is no substitute for fact. Let there be no mistake: Iran's leadership is dangerously inflexible and stubborn, destabilising the Middle East for generations through the calibrated use of proxies expert in terrorism and other forms of asymmetric warfare. Israel's leadership, particularly under Prime Minister Netanyahu, is equally inflexible and stubborn, combining irregular warfare – assassination in particular – with the more conventional application of military force. As the destruction of Gaza amplifies daily, it does so seemingly without compunction or respect for the basic rights of Palestinians. And in all of this, America perseveres with its longstanding preference for brawn over brain, destruction over diplomacy. 'Israel has the right to defend itself' is the mantra that both legitimises and normalises indiscriminate slaughter. Iran, it would appear, does not have quite the same right. Whereas Israel, a nuclear weapons state with the delivery systems to match, acts pre-emptively and opportunistically against its perceived adversaries – Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Iran – its neighbours enjoy only the right to sue for peace. And in the case of Iran, Trump called for 'unconditional surrender', though to whom was not quite so clear. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion Trump's decision to attack Iran takes the Middle East into a dangerously dystopian universe of prolonged chaos and pain. Casuistry excepted, there is not a shred of legal argument for America's actions. That reflects a fundamental dynamic that underpins the maelstrom that is now the Middle East: it is a battle of wills conducted by pig-headed narcissists obsessed by power and their own personal political survival at the expense of their nations' security. So the seeds have been sown for self-perpetuating instability and irreconcilable difference in the Middle East until the inevitable conflagration forces whoever might survive to the negotiating table to establish new constitutional arrangements. Countless people will die in the interim. As for Australia, Wong said the US had not requested our assistance in future military operations, and that she 'wouldn't speculate'. But eventually Australia will have to decide between principle and prostration. An erratic and temperamental Trump is once again poised to take the US into a war that will end in failure. It is a pity that the Albanese government is not yet ready to assert and advocate the moral dimension of the 'good international citizenship' that Labor governments love to talk about. Allan Behm is the author of No Enemies, No Friends and The Odd Couple (both by Upswell) and special advisor at The Australia Institute, Canberra
LBCI
6 days ago
- Politics
- LBCI
Israeli military says it struck nuclear sites including Bushehr on Gulf coast
An Israeli military spokesperson said on Thursday the military had struck nuclear sites in Bushehr, Isfahan, and Natanz, and continued to target additional facilities. Bushehr is Iran's only operating nuclear power plant, which sits on the Gulf coast, and uses Russian fuel that Russia then takes back when it is spent to reduce proliferation risk. The Russian embassy in Iran said in a statement earlier on Thursday that Bushehr was operating normally and that it did not see any security threats. Reuters
Bloomberg
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Bloomberg
Welcome to the New Nuclear Age. It's Even More Chaotic.
China's rise, Russia's aggression and America's unreliability could fuel a wave of atomic-weapons proliferation. By Nuclear weapons focus the mind. So when India and Pakistan fight, the world watches, because any clash between the two could become the first nuclear war since 1945. The most recent round of their subcontinental contest seems to have settled, thanks partly to US intervention. Just a day after Vice President JD Vance scoffed that the quarrel was none of America's business, he was working the phones to stop a slide down the slippery nuclear slope. But if this crisis has ebbed, the nuclear peril hasn't. The world is entering a new nuclear era, one more complex, and potentially far less stable, than the nuclear eras that came before.
