Trump says Iran agreed to remove enriched uranium with U.S. help

President Donald Trump said Iran had “agreed to everything” and would work with the United States to remove enriched uranium, a sweeping claim that still leaves the hardest questions unresolved: who controls the material, where it is stored and how it would be moved out of a country still under heavy nuclear scrutiny.

In a telephone interview with CBS News, Trump said the operation would not require U.S. ground troops. “No. No troops,” he said. “Our people” would work with Iranians to retrieve the material and then take it to the United States. He added, “We’ll go down and get it with them, and then we’ll take it,” and said there was “no need for fighting when there’s an agreement.” Trump also said Iran had agreed to stop backing proxy groups including Hezbollah and Hamas.

The practical challenge is enormous. The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a February 27 report that Iran’s total enriched uranium stockpile, as of June 13, 2025, was 9,874.9 kg, including 9,040.5 kg in the form of UF6. CBS News reported that Iran had also amassed about 972 pounds of 60%-enriched uranium by last summer, material far closer to weapons-grade than ordinary reactor fuel.

Much of that stockpile is not sitting in an easily accessible warehouse. CBS News reported in March that planning inside the Trump administration had centered on ways to secure or extract Iran’s nuclear materials, including possible deployment of Joint Special Operations Command forces. The same reporting said much of the uranium remained buried under nuclear sites bombed in the June 2025 strikes, when the United States attacked three Iranian nuclear facilities after Israeli attacks on several Iranian nuclear sites from June 13 to 24, 2025.

That history matters because the IAEA stopped verification activities in Iran when the military attacks began and withdrew inspectors by the end of June 2025. The agency’s board later reinstated earlier United Nations Security Council resolutions on Iran as of September 28, 2025, and asked for detailed reporting on the locations, quantities, chemical forms and enrichment levels of the stockpile. Any real transfer would have to contend with those unanswered accounting questions, along with contamination, transport security and the need to verify that all material had been located.

Trump said the two sides were meeting this weekend and that the United States would continue its blockade “until we get it done.” He also denied reporting that his administration might release $20 billion in frozen Iranian assets, saying, “No, we are not paying 10 cents.” For now, the public record shows a negotiation still in motion, a stockpile still subject to international concern and an extraction plan that has not yet been spelled out in enforceable terms.