Sanger was awarded, in 2004, the Weintal Prize for diplomatic reporting for his coverage of the Iraq and Korea crises. He also won the Aldo Beckman prize for coverage of the presidency. In both 2003 and 2007, he was awarded the Merriman Smith Memorial Award for coverage of national security strategy. He also shared the American Society of Newspaper Editors' top award for deadline writing in 2004, for team coverage of the Columbia disaster. In 2007, "The New York Times" received the DuPont Award from the Columbia Journalism School for "Nuclear Jihad: Can Terrorists Get the Bomb?", a documentary featuring him and colleague William J. Broad, and their investigation into the A.Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network. Their revelations in the "Times" about the network became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2011, Sanger was part of another team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for International Reporting for their coverage of the Japanese tsunami and nuclear disaster. In 2012, Sanger broke the story that President Obama early in his presidency had secretly commissioned the Stuxnet cyberattacks on Iranian nuclear facilities; his reporting was depicted in the documentary film "Zero Days" (2016).