United Nations atomic-energy inspectors are heading to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant amid fears that fighting in the area has damaged power lines and caused fires at the facility that could lead to nuclear catastrophe.

Not since the Cold War has the specter of nuclear war hung so heavily over a president’s crisis diplomacy.

As President Joe Biden meets with fellow NATO leaders, calls for a ceasefire in Ukraine are growing more urgent than ever — to alleviate the widespread human suffering but also to dial back what veterans of nuclear planning consider an alarming potential for it to spiral into a clash of atomic superpowers.

A group of Republican lawmakers is petitioning the House Foreign Affairs Committee to organize hearings on "Iran’s nuclear program, their support for terrorism, and their attempts to intimidate our allies," citing the Islamic Republic’s revamped march toward a nuclear weapon.

Iran said on Sunday that within hours it would breach the limits on uranium enrichment set four years ago in an accord with the United States and other international powers that was designed to keep Tehran from producing a nuclear weapon.
The latest move inches Iran closer to where it was before the accord: on the path to being able to produce an atomic bomb.

President Trump met Kim Jong Un at the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea on Sunday and crossed briefly into North Korea, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to visit the isolated state. The two men held 53 minutes of private talks and agreed to set up teams to “work out some details” to determine whether progress could be made in their negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear program, Trump said.

All signs may point to a successful and historic summit between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, but the stakes are so high that the U.S. national security community is braced for the possibility of a rapid spiral toward nuclear brinkmanship if the talks between the two men turn sour.

In June 2015, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn took a little-noticed trip to Egypt and Israel, paid for by a U.S. company he was advising. The company hoped to build more than two dozen nuclear plants in the region in partnership with Russian interests.

Unless something changes in the next few hours, it appears that at least 41 Democrats, according to The Washington Post and other media outlets, will attempt to block the nomination of Neil Gorsuch on the Senate floor. That could potentially cause Republicans to trigger the so-called "nuclear option" and vote to kill the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees.

The U.S. Senate could make history this week, but no one is feeling particularly good about it.

Secretary of State John Kerry assured lawmakers Thursday that the UN's nuclear watchdog would keep the U.S. informed about an ongoing investigation into whether Iran has pursued nuclear weapons in the past.