TARA COPP | Associated Press
The new Sentinel nuclear warhead program is 81% over budget and is now estimated to cost nearly $141 billion, but the Pentagon is moving forward with the program, saying that given the threats from China and Russia it does not have a choice…Military budget officials on Monday said when they set the program’s estimated costs their full knowledge of the modernization needed “was insufficient in hindsight to have a high-quality cost estimate,” Bill LaPlante, under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, told reporters on a call.
Reuters
Russia's Defence Ministry said on Friday it was conducting drills involving Yars mobile nuclear missile launchers, less than a month after it held tactical nuclear weapons deployment exercises alongside ally Belarus. The ministry said Yars missile launcher crews in at least two different regions were set to move over 100 kilometres (62 miles) and practice camouflage and deployment.It published video showing a mobile launcher manoeuvering along forest roads and taking up position before troops covered it in camouflage netting.
Reuters
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday that Kyiv planned to submit a resolution on nuclear safety, in particular at the Russia-occupied Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, for consideration at the United Nations General Assembly…"Ukraine will submit the draft resolution to the General Assembly for consideration shortly," Zelenskiy said on X, following a meeting in Kyiv with the Assembly's President Dennis Francis.
The Economist
Mr Pezeshkian says, too, that he hopes to ease sanctions by reviving the nuclear deal that Iran reached with America and other global powers in 2015, and which the Trump administration then abandoned in favour of “maximum pressure” on Iran three years later. He has recruited prominent advocates of a new deal to his side. In recent weeks, Javad Zarif, Iran’s former foreign minister and chief negotiator, acted as his campaign manager. But Mr Khamenei will probably shy away from negotiating a deal with an outgoing American administration that an incoming Trump presidency might again overturn.
Jennifer Hiller and Sha Hua | The Wall Street Journal
A high-tech race is under way between the U.S. and China as both countries chase an elusive energy source: fusion. China is outspending the U.S., completing a massive fusion technology campus and launching a national fusion consortium that includes some of its largest industrial companies. Crews in China work in three shifts, essentially around the clock, to complete fusion projects. And the Asian superpower has 10 times as many Ph.D.s in fusion science and engineering as the U.S. The result is an increasing worry among American officials and scientists that an early U.S. lead is slipping away.
Jeongmin Kim | NK News
It’s the June 25 anniversary today,” Na Kyung-won, a frontrunner to lead the conservative People Power Party (PPP), wrote on Facebook last week. “Now we have to arm ourselves with nuclear weapons too.”...But despite the attempt to assuage South Koreans’ security fears, several other members of the PPP quickly rallied behind Na’s position, reigniting a debate about nuclear weapons that had largely faded into the background since the allies sought to nip the issue in the bud last year…“While it’s still just a few mainstream ROK politicians, they are making use of the public’s concerns for domestic politics … now going as far as talking about pursuing nukes at the risk of international condemnation and torpedoing the U.S.-ROK alliance,” Choi Gi-il, a professor at Sangji University’s national security division, told NK News.