Iran said to have mined entrance to bombed nuclear site to deter US raid to retrieve uranium stockpile

Iran has, in recent weeks, deliberately collapsed tunnels and mined entrances to its bombed Isfahan nuclear complex in a bid to stop the US from launching a raid to retrieve the Islamic Republic’s store of highly enriched uranium that is believed to be buried at the site, CNN reports.

The report, citing five sources familiar with US intelligence, says that it is now far more difficult and dangerous for anyone, including the Iranians, to retrieve the uranium than it was at the start of the war, when US President Donald Trump mulled a ground operation to seize the nuclear stockpile.

A former senior nuclear official tells CNN that this also raises the risk that Iran could claim it was unable to retrieve some of the material.

The fate of the enriched stockpile is one of the key issues in an emerging deal between Iran and the US to end the war.

If negotiators “require that Iran bring the entire stockpile to a central location for verification and ultimately to remove or downblend the material,” that would place the onus on Tehran to access and “provide the full inventory” of enriched uranium, Scott Roecker, who headed the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Nuclear Material Removal from 2017 to 2021, tells CNN.

But, “in this scenario, I would worry that Iran would claim that some portion of the HEU was irretrievable,” Roecker says. “We wouldn’t have full confidence that Iran couldn’t retain access to it at some point in the future.”