Can the US seize Iran’s enriched uranium – and what are the risks?

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United States President Donald Trump is reportedly considering dispatching US special forces to Iran to seize the country’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium in what experts say would be a complicated and risky military operation.

Ensuring that Iran has no nuclear weapons, nor the capacity to produce any using enriched uranium, has been one of the US’s main stated demands during talks with Iranian officials over the past year. It was also the central justification Washington used when it bombed Iranian nuclear facilities during Iran’s 12-day war with Israel last year and for starting the ongoing conflict in February, despite being in active talks with Iran at the time.

What enriched uranium does Iran have, and where is it?

Currently, Iran is believed to have about 440 kilograms (970 pounds) of uranium enriched to 60 percent – the level at which it becomes much faster to get to the 90 percent threshold needed to produce a nuclear weapon. That amount is enough, theoretically, to produce more than 10 nuclear warheads, International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi told Al Jazeera in early March.

At the time, Grossi said almost half of the 60-percent-enriched uranium was probably still being stored in the tunnel complex at Iran’s Isfahan nuclear facility. An unknown quantity is also believed to be stored at the Natanz facility. These two underground nuclear sites, along with a third at Fordow, were destroyed or badly damaged in US-Israeli air strikes in the 12-day war last year and have been targeted during the current conflict.

Even if the US knows where the enriched uranium is, a military ground operation to extract it would face significant chemical, logistical, and tactical hurdles, however, experts say.

Iran nuclear facilities

How would US forces access the uranium?

With great difficulty, military experts told Al Jazeera.

Isfahan, where about half of the enriched uranium is believed to be stored, is more than 480 kilometres (about 300 miles) inland, hundreds of kilometres away from the nearest US naval ships.

That means that US forces, possibly alongside Israeli troops, would need to be transported over a very long distance through an active warzone. They would also have to bring in heavy equipment, including excavators, as tunnel entrances are believed to be buried under rubble following US-Israeli aerial attacks.

Once there, ground forces would have to secure a substantial perimeter around the site and then hold that territory for as long as the operation to dig the nuclear material out from the underground facilities may take.

“To send advanced units to the cordon the area, to start an excavation project, the duration of which is impossible to quantify, all the while remaining safe from what would be nearly constant fire from Iran, this is risky and not feasible,” said Jason Campbell, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “I don’t see any senior planning military officer pursuing this,” Campbell, who was also a former senior US defence official in the Obama and Trump administrations, added.

Cheryl Rofer, a former radiochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, estimates that the uranium is most likely being stored in the form of hexafluoride gas. This gas is difficult to handle and reacts with water to produce extremely toxic and corrosive chemicals.

The uranium hexafluoride must be stored in small, separated canisters to prevent neutrons from multiplying out of control and causing an intense radiation burst. This means that the cylinders would have to be kept at a distance from each other and that any damage to them as a result of an air strike or an accident during hurried transport could trigger the release of toxic chemicals, posing a radiological hazard to nearby personnel, explained Francois Diaz-Maurin, editor for nuclear affairs at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in an article earlier this month.

There is also the option of destroying the cylinders on the spot, instead of transporting them. The US Army has three special units called Army Nuclear Disablement Teams, which are trained to dismantle and destroy nuclear equipment and materials.

“But exploding the stockpile would chemically contaminate the immediate surroundings with toxic uranyl fluoride, creating a lasting environmental hazard,” explained Diaz-Maurin.

Furthermore, it would be difficult to determine whether all cylinders had been destroyed, leaving the risk that Iran could retrieve enough to manufacture a nuclear weapon.

“This is not a few helicopters and a couple of hours of activity – it is a much more complicated thing,” Ian Lesser, a distinguished fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told Al Jazeera. “And you would [have to] have absolute confidence that you could get it all out, or you would give the Iranian authorities enormous incentive to move on next month or year with the nuclear programme to establish a deterrent against further aggression.”

A much less risky approach would be for the US to strike a deal with Iran – something negotiators were attempting to do when the US and Israel first struck Tehran on February 28. A deal could result in the stockpile being left in place but under the watch of an international organisation, being “downblended” – its enrichment being reduced – or being taken away, but in agreement with Iranian authorities, Lesser said.

Has such an operation been undertaken before?

Yes.

In 1994, US forces flew about 600 kilograms (1,323 pounds) of weapons-grade uranium out of Kazakhstan to the US in an operation dubbed Project Sapphire. The operation was undertaken in secret, but was coordinated with the Kazakh authorities and the IAEA in a bid to remove nuclear material left over from the Soviet Union.

According to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the teams involved worked 12-hour shifts, six days a week, for four weeks just to move the material covertly from the metallurgical plant to a local airport.

Grossi told CBS News in late March that the IAEA is considering a similar option for Iran. But, as he noted, “there’s common sense. Nothing can happen while bombs are falling.”

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