Any U.S. army intervention to safe Iran’s uranium stockpile could be a fancy, dangerous, and prolonged operation, fraught with radiation and chemical risks, in response to consultants and former authorities officers.
President Donald Trump has provided shifting aims for the warfare in Iran, however has repeatedly mentioned a main intention is to ensure Tehran “never have a nuclear weapon.”
On Monday, it was reported that he’s open to the thought of launching a army operation to grab the nation’s uranium, and is weighing up the hazard to U.S. troops.
Given the dangers of deploying as much as 1,000 specifically educated forces, a negotiated settlement for the fabric’s give up with out power gives a viable various.
Iran holds 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 per cent purity, a brief technical step from weapons-grade 90 per cent as reported by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog.
This stockpile might enable Iran to construct as much as 10 nuclear bombs, ought to it weaponize its programme, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi mentioned in 2025, although he confused it “doesn’t mean Iran has such a weapon.”
Iran maintains its program is peaceable, regardless of IAEA and Western assertions of an organized nuclear weapons program till 2003.
Material probably saved in tunnels
IAEA inspectors haven’t been capable of confirm the close to weapons-grade uranium since June 2025, when Israeli and American strikes significantly weakened Iran’s air defenses, army management and nuclear program. The lack of inspections has made it tough to know precisely the place it’s positioned.
Grossi has mentioned that the IAEA believes a stockpile of roughly 200 kilograms (about 440 kilos) of extremely enriched uranium is saved in tunnels at Iran’s nuclear advanced exterior of Isfahan. The web site was primarily identified for producing the uranium gasoline that’s fed into centrifuges to be spun and purified.
Additional portions are believed to be on the Natanz nuclear web site and lesser quantities could also be saved at a facility in Fordo, he has mentioned.
It’s unclear whether or not extra portions might be elsewhere.
U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard advised a House listening to March 19 that the U.S. intelligence group has “high confidence” that it is aware of the placement of Iran’s extremely enriched uranium stockpiles.
Radiation and dangers
Iran’s stockpile of extremely enriched uranium suits into canisters every weighing about 50 kilograms (110 kilos) when full. The materials is within the type of uranium hexafluoride gasoline. Estimates on the variety of canisters vary from 26 to about twice that quantity, relying on how full every cylinder is.
The canisters carrying the extremely enriched uranium are “pretty robust” and are designed for storage and transport, mentioned David Albright, a former nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq and founding father of the nonprofit Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.
But he warned that “safety issues become paramount” ought to the canisters be broken — for instance, attributable to airstrikes — permitting moisture to get inside.
In such a situation, there could be a hazard from fluorine, a extremely poisonous chemical that’s corrosive to pores and skin, eyes and lungs. Anyone coming into the tunnels searching for to retrieve the canisters “would have to wear hazmat suits,” Albright mentioned.
It additionally could be crucial to keep up distance between the varied canisters in an effort to keep away from a self-sustaining crucial nuclear response that may result in “a large amount of radiation,” he mentioned.
To keep away from such a radiological accident, the canisters must be positioned in containers that create house between them throughout transport, he mentioned.
Albright mentioned that the popular possibility for coping with the uranium could be to take away it from Iran in particular army planes after which “downblend” it — combine it with lower-enriched supplies to carry it to ranges appropriate for civilian use.
Downblending the fabric inside Iran most likely just isn’t possible, provided that the infrastructure wanted for the method is probably not intact as a result of warfare, he added.
Darya Dolzikova, senior analysis fellow on the Royal United Services Institute, agreed.
Downblending the fabric inside Iran is “probably not the most likely option just because it’s a very complicated and long process that requires specialized equipment,” she mentioned.
‘High risk’ for floor troops
Securing Iran’s nuclear materials with floor troops could be a “very complex and high risk military operation,” mentioned Christine E. Wormuth, who was secretary of the Army below former U.S. President Joe Biden.
That is as a result of the fabric might be at a number of websites and the enterprise would “probably take casualties,” added Wormuth, now president and CEO of the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative.
The scale and scope of an operation at Isfahan alone would simply require 1,000 army personnel, she mentioned.
Given that tunnel entrances are most likely buried below rubble, it might be crucial for helicopters to fly in heavy gear, resembling excavators, and U.S. forces may even need to construct an airstrip close by to land all of the gear and troops, Wormuth mentioned.
She mentioned particular forces, together with maybe the seventy fifth Ranger Regiment, must work “in tandem” with nuclear consultants who would look underground for the canisters, including that the particular forces would probably arrange a safety perimeter in case of potential assaults.
Wormuth mentioned the Nuclear Disablement Teams below the twentieth Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, Explosives Command could be one potential unit that might be employed in such an operation.
“The Iranians have thought this through, I’m sure, and are going to try to make it as difficult as possible to do this in an expeditious way,” she said. “So I would imagine it will be a pretty painstaking effort to go underground, get oriented, try to discern … which ones are the real canisters, which ones may be decoys, to try to avoid booby traps.”
The method ahead
The best choice could be “to have an agreement with the (Iranian) government to remove all of that material,” mentioned Scott Roecker, former director of the Office of Nuclear Material Removal on the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semiautonomous company throughout the U.S. Department of Energy.
An analogous mission occurred in 1994 when the U.S., in partnership with the federal government of Kazakhstan, secretly transported 600 kilograms (about 1,322 kilos) of weapons-grade uranium from the previous Soviet republic in an operation dubbed “Project Sapphire.” The materials was left over from the united states’s nuclear program.
Roecker, now vice chairman for the Nuclear Materials Security Program on the Nuclear Threat Initiative, mentioned the Department of Energy’s Mobile Packaging Unit was constructed from the expertise in Kazakhstan. It has safely eliminated nuclear materials from a number of nations, together with from Georgia in 1998 and from Iraq in 2004, 2007 and 2008.
The unit consists of technical consultants and specialised gear that may be deployed wherever to securely take away nuclear materials, and Roecker mentioned it might be ideally positioned to take away the uranium below a negotiated cope with Iran. Tehran stays suspicious of Washington, which below Trump withdrew from a nuclear settlement and has twice attacked throughout high-level negotiations.
Under a negotiated answer, IAEA inspectors additionally might be a part of a mission. “We are considering these options, of course,” the IAEA’s Grossi mentioned March 22 on CBS’ Face the Nation when requested about such a situation.
Iran has “a contractual obligation to allow inspectors in,” he added. “Of course, there’s common sense. Nothing can happen while bombs are falling.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iran-war-us-uranium-nuclear-b2949921.html