{"id":332344,"date":"2026-03-10T21:42:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T21:42:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/332344\/"},"modified":"2026-03-10T21:42:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T21:42:08","slug":"us-weighs-sending-forces-into-iran-to-secure-nuclear-stockpile-reports-say-iran-nuclear-programme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/332344\/","title":{"rendered":"US weighs sending forces into Iran to secure nuclear stockpile, reports say | Iran nuclear programme"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Trump administration is reportedly considering the deployment of special forces into Iran<\/a> to secure its stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU), which experts say could be used to make at least 10 nuclear warheads.<\/p>\n

Preventing Iran from acquiring a bomb is one of Trump\u2019s stated war aims, and the 440kg HEU stockpile represents the greatest nuclear threat as it could be turned into weapons-grade uranium relatively easily. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has told Congress that \u201cpeople are going to have to go and get it\u201d.<\/p>\n

Rubio did not go into greater detail, but there have been US and Israeli reports on discussions between the two countries on how such a mission might be carried out by special forces from either or both militaries. But nuclear experts say the complexity and risk involved would be considerable.<\/p>\n

Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said on Monday that the UN watchdog body believed that 200kg of Iran\u2019s HEU stockpile was in deep tunnels at its nuclear complex outside the city of Isfahan. He added that there was another \u201camount\u201d of HEU in another nuclear centre at Natanz, where Iranians have constructed a new fortified and deeply buried facility called Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, known to western analysts as Pickaxe Mountain.<\/p>\n

The new fortified and deeply buried facility known to western analysts as Pickaxe Mountain. Photograph: Maxar\/DigitalGlobe\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

The HEU is in the form of uranium hexafluoride, which is solid at room temperature but turns into a gas when heated allowing it to be further enriched. It is believed to be stored in metal canisters each about the size of a scuba diving tank, stored down deep shafts.<\/p>\n

US and Israeli special forces have long trained for missions to extract nuclear materials from hostile environments, and the US has developed equipment, known as the Mobile Uranium Facility<\/a>, designed to contain and remove HEU. But deploying it along with specialists and a force to protect them would involve major ground operations in at least two sites, both deep in Iran\u2019s interior.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat would be tough. It is pretty well defended and it\u2019s large and bulky, so you\u2019re not going to just go in and pick it up,\u201d Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear proliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs a C-17 [military transport plane] going to land in the desert and you\u2019re going to set up a security perimeter and cranes are going to drive off it? Or maybe you go in and blow it up and make a mess? All of these options seem fanciful to me,\u201d Lewis said.<\/p>\n

Questioned on the issue on Saturday, Donald Trump acknowledged the challenge<\/a> involved, and suggested such an operation was not imminent.<\/p>\n

The president said US troops would not be sent in until Iranian defending forces \u201cwould be so decimated that they wouldn\u2019t be able to fight on the ground level\u201d.<\/p>\n

He did not rule out a ground operation to secure nuclear material but said it would be at a later stage in the conflict.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt some point maybe we will,\u201d he said. \u201cWe haven\u2019t gone after it. We wouldn\u2019t do it now. Maybe we will do it later.\u201d<\/p>\n

The administration\u2019s critics have expressed astonishment that a mission to secure the HEU did not appear to have been thought through before the war was launched. A Democratic congressman, Bill Foster, emerged from a classified briefing on the war last week saying he had heard nothing<\/a> about a plan to address Iran\u2019s nuclear capabilities.<\/p>\n

\u201cIran\u2019s stockpile of highly enriched uranium should be the administration\u2019s primary focus. That is clearly not the case,\u201d Foster said.<\/p>\n

Matthew Bunn, a nuclear policy analyst at the Harvard Kennedy School, said it was \u201cjust shocking to launch a military operation like this, justified by the nuclear danger, and not have a plan for dealing with the most urgent part of the nuclear danger\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cClearly, something should be done to address that HEU stock \u2013 it\u2019s the most important element of potential nuclear weapons capability in Iran,\u201d Bunn said. He added that the best solution was a postwar deal in which the HEU was diluted or shipped out of the country. Such solutions were being negotiated<\/a> in US-Iranian talks brokered by Oman that were under way when Israel and US launched their attack on 28 February.<\/p>\n

Trying to ship the HEU without Iranian compliance, blending it down or blowing it up where it is, all posed enormous problems, Bunn said.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor now, it appears the United States and Israel are relying on close monitoring of the site to make sure the canisters aren\u2019t removed, while they figure out what to do longer-term,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs long as it stays in Iran, the plan is that if anyone gets near it, they will be killed. That is the strategy as it stands,\u201d said Meir Javedanfar , an Iran expert at Reichman University in Israel. He added that the monitoring strategy was not foolproof.<\/p>\n

\u201cSomeone could build a tunnel and go seize it. You can\u2019t be 100% sure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if they were able to whisk the HEU out of sight, the surviving members of the Iranian regime meanwhile would also face enormous risks if they attempted to \u201crace to a bomb\u201d. Further enrichment, turning the weapons-grade uranium into a metal, shaping it, building an explosive device to trigger it and putting it on a missile or other delivery system, could theoretically be done in a few months, but doing it without being detected would be extremely hard.<\/p>\n

Robert Malley, who was the US special envoy to Iran in the Biden administration, said that was the dilemma that had faced the Iranian regime for years.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the period I was there, there was increasing chatter openly in Iran and in other channels that suggested that they were thinking for the first time in a long time seriously about whether they should acquire a bomb,\u201d Malley said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the problem was always from the moment you make the decision to the moment you acquire the bomb, that\u2019s the zone of maximum danger when you\u2019re likely to be detected,\u201d he added. \u201cAnd if you\u2019re detected you\u2019re almost certain to be bombed. And that problem hasn\u2019t evaporated.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cI\u2019m not saying it\u2019s impossible, but it would be a really very dangerous gamble.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Trump administration is reportedly considering the deployment of special forces into Iran to secure its stockpile of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":332345,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-332344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332344\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/332345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}