U.S. Weighs Ground Forces to Seize Iran's Buried Enriched Uranium Stockpiles

As the conflict with Iran enters its fourth week, the Trump administration is actively considering a military operation to retrieve hundreds of pounds of highly enriched uranium believed to be buried deep inside the Isfahan Mountain complex, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed this week. "It's an option on the table for him," Leavitt told reporters, marking the first explicit public acknowledgment that the administration has not ruled out seizing Iran's nuclear material as part of the ongoing campaign.

The stakes are considerable. According to the IAEA, Iran had amassed roughly 972 pounds of 60%-enriched uranium as of last summer, material the agency describes as a short step away from weapons-grade. Enrichment above approximately 90% is sufficient to produce a nuclear weapon. Iran is the only non-nuclear weapons state to enrich uranium to the 60% threshold, the IAEA has said, and Iran insists the program serves purely peaceful purposes. The U.S. intelligence community assessed last spring that Iran was not actively trying to build a nuclear weapon.

The U.S. bombing campaign that struck three Iranian nuclear facilities last June did not destroy all of that stockpile. Much of it is now believed to sit in underground storage at Isfahan, with additional material at the Natanz nuclear facility. IAEA director-general Rafael Grossi said Monday that around 200 kilograms probably remains at Isfahan. Iranian workers have spent months since the strikes clearing rubble from the facility's aboveground structures and tunneling into the underground passages where the uranium was stored, according to two sources familiar with the military planning.

Grossi, who appeared on CBS News' "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan," was direct about the hazards of any seizure attempt. "We're talking about cylinders containing gas of highly contaminated uranium hexafluoride at 60%, so it's very difficult to handle," he said. "I'm not saying it's impossible. I know that there are incredible military capacities to do that, but it would be a very challenging operation for sure."

The operational footprint required would go well beyond a covert raid. Seven current and former officials familiar with military planning told CNN that recovering the stockpile would require a significant number of U.S. ground troops, far exceeding a small special operations force, and would involve moving or rendering safe tons of highly radioactive material. If executed, it would represent the first major commitment of U.S. ground forces in the current campaign, an escalation that would put a large number of troops in direct harm's way.

President Trump has stated since the war's outset that ensuring Iran cannot acquire a nuclear weapon is a central objective. More recently, the administration shifted toward a broader and more permanent goal: ensuring Iran is no longer capable of producing a nuclear weapon at all.

The human cost of the campaign is already mounting. Six U.S. service members were killed and dozens injured in an Iranian drone attack on a base in Kuwait. One service member died in an attack in Saudi Arabia. Six more Americans were killed last week when a refueling aircraft crashed in Iraq. Whether the administration will absorb further risk by ordering troops into an underground nuclear storage complex remains an open question, one that physicists, intelligence officials, and the head of the world's nuclear watchdog are all now weighing publicly.