U.S. President Donald Trump is weighing a military operation to extract nearly 1,000 pounds of 60% enriched uranium from Iran, reported the Wall Street Journal on March 29, citing unnamed U.S. officials. “Trump hasn’t made a decision on whether to give the order, the officials said, adding that he is considering the danger to U.S. troops.”
On Sunday night, March 29, Trump told reporters that Iran must do what the U.S. demands or “they’re not going to have a country.” Referring to Iran’s uranium, Trump said, “They’re going to give us the nuclear dust.”
Trump seems to think seizing Iran’s uranium would be easy, but in fact it would be a complex mission with high risk of failure. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi has said that the enriched uranium is still in the form of uranium hexafluoride gas contained in gas cylinders in at least two locations: an underground tunnel at the nuclear complex in Isfahan and a cache at Natanz.
“Teams of U.S. forces would need to fly to the sites, likely under fire from Iranian surface-to-air missiles and drones. Once on site, combat troops would need to secure perimeters so that engineers with excavating equipment could search through debris and check for mines and booby traps,” the Journal explains. “The extraction of the material would likely need to be conducted by an elite special operations team specially trained to remove radioactive material from a conflict zone….
“Unless an airfield was available, a makeshift one would need to be set up to bring equipment in and take the nuclear material out. The entire operation would take days or even a week to complete, experts said.”
“‘This is not a quick in and out kind of deal,’ said retired Gen. Joseph Votel, the former commander of U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command.”
