First Read: Iran’s New Nuclear Weapon Attempt

New intelligence suggests Iran explored an ambitious, untested idea: a pure-fusion nuclear weapon

It began quietly, these things usually do, with what Israeli officials described to me as “troubling signs.” At the start of the war, a few months after October 7, 2023, signals came from Iran - fragmentary and easy to dismiss - that did not fit the familiar patterns of uranium enrichment or weaponization. They pointed somewhere stranger. More ambitious…