A senior U.S. defense official last week voiced confidence in a newly defined "reuse" approach to modernizing nuclear warheads that some scientists have called into doubt.

The authors argue that the Obama administration's moves to pursue and strengthen nuclear arms control is weakening the U.S. nuclear deterrent and inviting attack.

President Obama plans deep new cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal at a time when the government faces a 15-year backlog of warheads already waiting to be dismantled and a need for billions of dollars in new facilities to store and dispose of the weapons' plutonium.

President Obama is preparing to move ahead with the most ambitious arms-control agenda in decades, calling for dramatic cuts in US and Russian arsenals, a halt to the Bush administration's plan for a more advanced nuclear warhead, and the ratification of a global treaty banning underground nuclear tests.

The Obama administration is considering whether to shift the management of nuclear weapons production to the Pentagon from the Energy Department, a step that would end more than 60 years of civilian control over nuclear bomb manufacture.

A supercomputer with the processing power of two million laptops or 20 petafops is to be built by IBM for the US government to help manage its nuclear arsenal.

The latest U.S. nuclear showdown doesn't involve a foreign enemy. Instead it pits President Barack Obama against his Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, and concerns the question of whether America needs a new generation of nuclear warheads.

One of the most important national security decisions facing President-elect Barack Obama is whether to continue the hotly contested Bush administration plan to build the first new U.S. warheads since the end of the Cold War.

The leader of the U.S. Strategic Command said yesterday that "time is not on our side" to modernize the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile, particularly as China and Russia upgrade their nuclear warheads and delivery systems.

USAF General Kevin Chilton, head of U.S. Strategic Command, argues that the current U.S. nuclear arsenal is in drastic need of a technological upgrade to ensure its reliability as the majority of the arsenal was built using technology from the 1950s.