Trump Weighs Military Raid to Seize Iran's Enriched Uranium

What's Being Considered

President Donald Trump is weighing a military operation to extract nearly 1,000 pounds — approximately 450 kilograms — of enriched uranium from Iran, according to U.S. officials who spoke to The Wall Street Journal. No final decision has been made, but officials say Trump has remained broadly open to the option and is actively weighing the danger it would pose to U.S. troops against his stated strategic goal of permanently closing Iran's path to a nuclear weapon.

Trump has privately told political allies that Iran cannot be allowed to retain the uranium, according to a person familiar with his thinking who spoke to The Wall Street Journal. His advisers have been directed to press Tehran through diplomatic intermediaries to surrender the material as a ceasefire condition; a forced military extraction is being kept on the table if those demands go unmet.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement: "It's the job of the Pentagon to make preparations in order to give the commander-in-chief maximum optionality. It does not mean the president has made a decision." The Pentagon and U.S. Central Command declined to comment.

On Sunday evening, Trump told reporters that non-compliance would be catastrophic for Iran — that "they're not going to have a country" — and was direct about the uranium's fate: "They're going to give us the nuclear dust."

What the Uranium Is and Where It Is

The uranium stockpile in question dates to before last June's joint U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran. At that time, Iran held an estimated 882-plus pounds of uranium enriched to 60 percent, and nearly 441 pounds enriched to 20 percent fissile material — material that experts say is technically straightforward to upgrade to the 90 percent weapons-grade level needed for a nuclear device, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency's assessment.

IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi has stated that most of the enriched material is believed to be held at two sites: Isfahan — in an underground tunnel within the nuclear complex — and at Natanz. Grossi told CBS earlier this month that he doubted the feasibility of a forced extraction. Iran retains the centrifuge capacity and technical expertise to reconstitute an enrichment program even if the current stockpile were removed, according to IAEA assessments.

The Operational Challenge

Former U.S. military officers and security analysts describe a forced uranium seizure as arguably the most operationally demanding mission Trump could authorize. The uranium is believed to be held in 40 to 50 purpose-built cylinders roughly the size of scuba tanks. According to Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at Columbia University and a former U.S. nuclear negotiator with Iran who spoke to The Wall Street Journal, those cylinders would need to be transferred into accident-rated transport casks by a specially trained team — a process that could fill several trucks.

The logistics compound quickly: U.S. aircraft would first need to penetrate Iranian air defenses through surface-to-air missile and drone fire. Ground forces would have to secure perimeters around the nuclear site while engineers with heavy excavation equipment searched through debris for decoy cylinders, booby traps, and mines. A temporary airfield would likely need to be constructed on-site to extract the cargo. The full operation could run for a week, according to analysis cited by The Wall Street Journal.

The operation would be the most complex Trump has ordered, according to multiple former U.S. military officials cited in reporting by The Wall Street Journal, Haaretz, and Israel Hayom. Any attempt at forced extraction would almost certainly trigger Iranian retaliation and risk extending the war well beyond the publicly stated four-to-six week horizon.

Historical Precedent

The U.S. has extracted enriched uranium from foreign countries before, though under vastly different circumstances. In 1994, the U.S. executed Project Sapphire — a peaceful transfer in which uranium was removed from Kazakhstan with the cooperation of the Kazakhstani government. In 1998, the U.S. and United Kingdom cooperated to remove highly enriched uranium from a reactor near the Georgian capital and transport it to a nuclear complex in Scotland. Both operations were conducted as consensual diplomatic arrangements, not combat missions.

Diplomatic Track Running in Parallel

Three countries — Pakistan, Turkey, and Egypt — have been functioning as intermediaries between Washington and Tehran, though direct negotiations between the parties have not begun, according to The Wall Street Journal. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated last week that U.S. objectives can be achieved without ground forces. Trump's stated ceasefire condition is that any resolution must end without any possibility of Iran gaining a nuclear weapon.

The Pentagon, already well-equipped in the theater, is considering deploying an additional 10,000 ground troops to give Trump broader options, U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal. Contingency deployments — including quick-reaction Marine units and 82nd Airborne paratroopers — are being staged in the region to seize strategic points, including an island off Iran's southern coast, if ordered.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, when asked about options regarding the uranium, said the administration had "a range of options, up to and including Iran deciding that they will give [it] up, which of course we would welcome," adding that he would "never tell this group or the world what we're willing to do or how far we're willing to go, but we have options, for sure."

What This Means

The uranium extraction question sits at the core of what the Trump administration says it is fighting for. Removing the stockpile would physically constrain Iran's ability to build a nuclear device in the near term, though experts note Iran still retains the technical knowledge and centrifuge infrastructure to eventually reconstitute an enrichment program. Whether the risk of a prolonged combat operation on Iranian soil to seize the uranium is worth that near-term gain remains the central unresolved question facing the president.