‘A Million Things Could Go Wrong’ – Why Seizing Iran’s Uranium Would Be So Risky for the U.S.

U.S. troops storming a secretive, underground nuclear facility to seize Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium may sound far-fetched, but it is an option President Donald Trump is reportedly considering to achieve his main objective in the war: preventing the regime from developing nuclear weapons.

…

Senior administration officials said at the start of the war that the US might consider diluting Iran’s highly enriched uranium on site, rather than removing it from the country. But that would be a large, complex and time-consuming operation, said Jonathan Ruhe, an expert on Iran’s nuclear programme at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, a conservative think tank in Washington DC.

Seizing and taking the uranium out of Iran is faster and would allow the US to dilute the material in the United States, Ruhe said. The operation would be deeply risky no matter how it is done, he added.

“You’ve got basically a half ton of what’s effectively weapons grade uranium that you’ve got to extricate,” Ruhe said. “And there are a million things that could go wrong.”

…