Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran is accelerating its production of enriched uranium. It was just the latest in a series of progressive breaches by Tehran of the 2015 nuclear agreement, as part of an effort to raise the pressure on the Trump administration for withdrawing from the deal and reimposing devastating economic sanctions on Iran. But last week’s announcement marked a key milestone: For the first time in years, Iran possesses enough low-enriched uranium to manufacture a nuclear weapon, although it would first have to enrich the uranium to a much higher level. Experts now [...]
In this week’s editors’ discussion on Trend Lines, WPR’s Judah Grunstein and Elliot Waldman talk about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s escalating military confrontation with the Russian-backed forces of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and how Erdogan’s decision to wade into the Syrian conflict is coming back to haunt him. They also discuss the refugee crisis that erupted this week along Greece’s border with Turkey, and its echoes of the 2015 European migrant crisis. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our [...]
The U.S. military recently confirmed that it has fielded controversial low-yield nuclear warheads on certain submarine-launched ballistic missiles. Plans for the new warhead were included in President Donald Trump’s 2018 nuclear posture review, and its explosive yield is roughly a third of the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima during World War II. Trump administration officials argue that the new warhead will serve as a deterrent for Russia’s so-called tactical nuclear weapons, but experts fear that the prevalence of these low-yield nuclear weapons will make an eventual conflict more likely. The news of their deployment comes amid broader scrutiny of [...]
