Pentagon Plots Daring Iran Uranium Grab

Washington is quietly gaming out how to grab Iran’s buried nuclear fuel with commandos before anyone can build a bomb or restart a war.

Story Snapshot

U.S. and Israeli officials have discussed sending elite troops into Iran to secure highly enriched uranium.^[1]
Planning talks focus on small special operations raids, not a full-scale invasion or occupation.^[1]^[2]
Experts warn the mission would be one of the riskiest operations ever attempted, with underground sites and toxic hazards.^[2]^[4]^[5]
Trump has openly kept “taking the uranium” on the table, forcing the Pentagon to prepare real options.^[2]^[3]

The buried prize at the center of the Iran fight

The Iran crisis now turns on a strange question: who controls several hundred pounds of material most Americans will never see, inside tunnels they will never visit. Iran has built up a stock of uranium enriched to about 60 percent, only one short step from weapons grade.^[2]^[3] Analysts say that, if pushed higher, that much uranium could fuel ten or more nuclear bombs.^[3]^[4] After the 2025 U.S. airstrikes on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, much of that stockpile ended up literally buried under rubble.^[4]^[6]

That buried stockpile creates both danger and opportunity. On paper, the strikes smashed Iran’s centrifuges and halted active enrichment.^[1]^[2]^[6] In practice, the material is still inside Iran’s borders, in hardened underground spaces that Tehran once controlled. U.S. and Israeli officials now worry about three things: whether Iran can dig it back out, whether someone else could get to it first, and whether the United States has any clean way to make sure it never fuels a bomb.^[1]^[4]^[5]

How a “small raid” became a live option

Against that backdrop, senior officials in Washington and Jerusalem have talked through a scenario that once belonged in Tom Clancy novels: send special operations teams into Iran to secure the uranium itself.^[1]^[2] Axios reports that four informed sources described discussions about inserting U.S., Israeli, or joint forces into Iran to reach those underground sites, either to remove the material entirely or to bring in scientists to dilute it on the spot.^[1]

CBS News separately reports that planning inside the Trump administration has centered on the secretive Joint Special Operations Command, the unit that handles the hardest counter-proliferation and manhunt missions.^[2] White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said out loud that trying to retrieve the stockpiles is “an option on the table,” and added that it is the Pentagon’s job to get ready.^[2] Trump has told reporters he wants the uranium “back,” either through a deal or, if needed, with “boots on the ground” fighting their way in.^[3]

What the mission would actually demand on the ground

Television sound bites make this sound like a quick in-and-out grab. The real picture is much harsher. A detailed analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies lays out three broad military options: bomb and collapse the tunnels, raid the sites and destroy the uranium in place, or seize and remove the material from Iranian control.^[5] That third option is the most ambitious and the only one that gives near-total confidence the stockpile is dealt with.^[4]^[5]

To do it, forces would first need to “bust open” tunnel entrances already hardened and then re-buried by earlier strikes.^[4]^[5] They would then push into underground facilities that may be partially collapsed, dark, and contaminated, while securing a perimeter against any surviving Iranian forces.^[4]^[5] U.S. experts interviewed in recent broadcasts say that even one main site like Isfahan could take roughly a thousand personnel to secure, and a full mission could require several thousand troops from multiple services, not a dozen commandos with night-vision goggles.^[2]^[3]^[4]

Radiation, gas, and the clock on Iranian resistance

Even if American and Israeli troops reach the vaults, the hardest work would just be starting. Some plans call for attaching explosives to uranium stored as uranium hexafluoride gas and detonating it inside the mountain.^[4]^[5] When that gas hits oxygen, it forms poisonous compounds that would contaminate the facility. Experts say the fallout would likely stay underground, but anyone entering afterward would need heavy chemical protection, more gear, and more time inside a hostile country.^[4]

The cleaner option, from a nonproliferation standpoint, is to seize the material and haul it out. That would mean securing tunnels long enough for nuclear scientists, possibly including personnel linked to the International Atomic Energy Agency, to package the uranium safely.^[1]^[3]^[4] Every extra hour on the ground would give any remaining Iranian units more time to regroup, ambush convoys, or fire at extraction aircraft. That is why some former officials call the mission “very complex and high risk,” even as they admit it is technically possible.^[2]^[4]

The real choice: ugly risk now or bigger war later

So where does that leave U.S. decision makers and voters watching from their couches. On one side, you have a president who says Iran will not keep its “nuclear dust,” and who believes American power should be used to solve problems, not just manage them.^[2]^[3] On the other side, you have military professionals and analysts warning that this would be one of the most dangerous special operations missions in modern history, with no guarantee of a clean exit.^[2]^[4]^[5]^[7]

From a conservative common-sense view, the question is not whether the Pentagon can write a plan. It already has. The question is whether the risk to American troops, and the chances of a wider war, are worth the benefit of holding those steel canisters in U.S. hands instead of under an Iranian mountain. That trade-off, not the movie-style raid itself, is what will matter when a future president asks, “Can we take it?” and the room has to answer, “Yes—but at what cost?”^[1]^[2]^[4]^[5]