US op to seize Iran’s uranium would take weeks, require building a runway — report

A US military option to seize some 450 kilograms of highly enriched uranium would reportedly require flying in excavation equipment and building a runway for cargo planes to fly off with the radioactive material.

US President Donald Trump was presented with the plan by his military over the past week, two people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post, though experts said such an operation would take weeks and carry enormous risks to troops.

Iran’s stockpile of some 450 kilograms of 60 percent-enriched uranium is believed to be buried under the rubble of sites bombed by the US last year, specifically near Isfahan and the Natanz area.

The mission to extract it would demand an airlift of hundreds or even thousands of troops specially trained to remove nuclear material from behind enemy lines, along with heavy equipment, all while operating under Iranian fire, former defense officials told the Post.

Personnel, which would include civilian nuclear specialists, would live in a small base instead of a clandestine site, and after forces completed the arduous task of blasting through the rubble to collect uranium, planes would need to take off from a purpose-built runway to carry the material away, the Post reported.

“It is slow, meticulous and can be an extremely deadly process,” a former special operator trained for such missions said. Another former defense official described the potential mission as looking like “you’re not just buying a car on the lot, you’re buying the entire assembly line.”

Trump said in an address to the nation on Wednesday that the Iranian nuclear sites bombed by the US last June “have been hit so hard that it would take months to get near the nuclear dust. And we have it under intense satellite surveillance and control. If we see [the Iranians] make a move, even a move for it, we’ll hit them with missiles very hard again.”

Retired US Gen. Joseph Votel told the Post that a military operation was possible to extract the uranium, but that International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) personnel were best equipped to remove the material under a ceasefire.

He added that there were “a lot of risks associated” with a military operation.

“This is a very high order of complexity. There likely will be casualties,” he added. “But this is the problem set for US Special Operations forces. It’s what we do. We have people who are specifically trained to go into these types of environments.”

Another former official said an operation was indeed possible, despite the complexities: “Short of a largely symbolic quick strike to demonstrate we could do more, to recover much or all of the material requires a temporary occupation.”

In response to the report, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said the briefing on the plan “does not mean the President has made a decision.”

Reports on such an escalatory military operation came as Trump publicly spoke of the war winding down, boasting that the US and Israel were close to completing their key objectives.

But two Pentagon officials told The New York Times on Wednesday that Washington is adding 18 A-10 Warthog attack planes to the nearly a dozen it already has deployed in the Middle East.

The slow-moving planes, which carry heavy firepower, could be used to assist in a potential ground invasion of territory near the Strait of Hormuz aimed at opening the strategic waterway that Iran has effectively blocked since the beginning of the war, the report said.

The presence of the slow-moving planes suggests that Iran’s air defenses are obliterated or heavily weakened, the report added.

Israel and the US launched their campaign against Iran on February 28 in a bid to destabilize the regime and destroy its nuclear and ballistic missile capacities. Iran has responded with missile and drone strikes across the region, and its proxies in Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon have also carried out attacks, with Israel launching airstrikes and a ground operation in Lebanon in response to the Hezbollah terror group’s rocket barrages.

Agencies and Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.