Trump says U.S. will recover Iran uranium at leisurely pace

Donald Trump said the United States would enter Iran at a “leisurely pace” to recover enriched uranium and bring it back to the United States, casting the operation as a controlled handoff rather than a military raid. He also said no U.S. ground troops would be used, and told CBS News that Iranians had “agreed to everything,” including removal of enriched uranium.

That public confidence sits uneasily beside the bargaining that is still underway. U.S. and Iranian negotiators had narrowed some differences, but they remained split over Iran’s enrichment program and the fate of the highly enriched stockpile. An Iranian source said Tehran was not ready to send all of its highly enriched uranium abroad, though it could send part of it to a third country.

The technical problem is bigger than the language of agreement. The International Atomic Energy Agency said its inspectors last verified more than 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60% in Iran shortly before the June 13, 2025, Israeli strikes. The agency has said verification activities stopped after the June 2025 military attacks, and that it would resume checks on a stockpile that can no longer be directly tracked. Before the war, the agency had also estimated Iran’s total enriched uranium stockpile at 8,294.4 kilograms as of February 8, 2025, and later put it at 9,874.9 kilograms as of June 13, 2025.

The physical sites at the center of the crisis were hit hard. U.S. and Israeli attacks on June 22, 2025, struck three Iranian nuclear facilities, Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz, while the wider war had already disrupted monitoring. Military experts have said seizing highly enriched uranium would be more difficult than any special-operations mission they have practiced, because the material must be located, secured, transported and accounted for without losing control of even a portion of it.

That is why pace matters. A slow, improvised recovery would complicate enforcement, prolong uncertainty over whether the stockpile is intact, and keep pressure on a region still absorbing the effects of war. Trump said talks could still produce a deal soon, and Reuters-linked reporting said the administration was weighing major concessions, including a possible release of $20 billion in frozen Iranian funds in exchange for the uranium stockpile. Abbas Araghchi said the Strait of Hormuz was open after a ceasefire agreement in Lebanon, but until the uranium is traced with confidence, diplomacy remains ahead of the facts on the ground.