American intelligence agencies have determined that Iran or potentially another group could retrieve Iran’s primary store of highly enriched uranium even though it was entombed under the country’s nuclear site at Isfahan by US strikes last year, according to multiple officials familiar with the classified reports.
Officials familiar with the intelligence said that Iran can now get to the uranium through a very narrow access point. It is unclear how quickly Iran could move the uranium, which is in gas form and stored in canisters.
US officials have said that American spy agencies have constant surveillance of the Isfahan site and have a high degree of confidence they could detect — and react — to any attempt by the Iranian government or other groups to move it.
That stockpile of uranium would be a key building block if Iran decided to move towards making a nuclear weapon.
With Iran in chaos from the ongoing strikes by the US and Israel, the fate of the uranium and the options for securing it have become critical issues for the Trump administration.
On Saturday, US President Donald Trump was asked by reporters on Air Force One if he would consider sending in ground forces to secure the highly enriched uranium.
“Right now we’re just decimating them, but we haven’t gone after it,” he said. “But something we could do later on. We wouldn’t do it now.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said on Saturday that the decision to go to war with Iran was motivated, in part, by the Iranian government’s decision to move its nuclear and missile projects so far underground that they would be "immune to any assault".
The US chose not to try to retrieve the uranium last year after the 12-day war in which Iran’s nuclear sites came under intense bombardment. Trump determined that doing so at that time would be too dangerous.
Any insertion of ground forces — presumably Special Operations commandos — would be highly risky. US officials said that the air campaign against Iran would need to continue for days to further weaken Iranian defences before any final decision on the viability of that type of raid.
New York Times News Service