Expert Tells 60 Minutes That Thousands of U.S. Troops Would Be Needed To Retrieve Iran’s Highly-Enriched Uranium

A nuclear expert told 60 Minutes on Sunday that the U.S. would need to send thousands of troops deep into Iran if it wanted to retrieve that country’s stash of highly enriched uranium (HEU).

Andrew Weber, a nuclear expert who helped covertly move more than 1,300 pounds of HEU out of Kazakhstan after the fall of the Soviet Union, said the entire operation took 30 people and about six weeks to complete when it was transferred to Oak Ridge, TN, in the 1990s.

Correspondent Cecilia Vega asked, “Would the same mission be possible today in Iran?”

“In Iran, we couldn’t send a team in to do this unilaterally without great risk,” Weber said. “You would need to set up in the middle of the country, a secure perimeter. It would probably take thousands of U.S. troops to secure the facility while our experts excavated the HEU that’s located inside deep tunnels at a place called Isfahan.”

The Isfahan nuclear facility located in Iran’s desert is where most of Iran’s HEU is believe to be stored in scuba tank-sized containers, according to Vega.

“It’s believed those containers are in tunnels so far below ground, America’s bunker-busting bombs may not be able to reach them,” Vega said.

She asked former White House nuclear adviser Dr. Matthew Bunn, now with Harvard’s Belfer Center, about President Donald Trump’s repeated claims “that Iran’s nuclear program was completely obliterated after the strikes last June.”

“Yeah, that statement is just not true,” Bunn said. “You can’t say that a program that still has enough nuclear material for a bunch of nuclear bombs is ‘obliterated,’ unfortunately. There’s no doubt that the combination of the strikes in June of last year and the ongoing war have seriously set back Iran’s capabilities. But the remaining capabilities are substantial. You can’t bomb away their knowledge.”

Vega then asked about the nearly 1,000 pounds of 60% enriched uranium believed to be buried at Isfahan.

“What can you do with that?” she asked.

“So that is enough material for — if you enrich it just a little bit more — for 10 to 11 nuclear bombs,” Bunn answered.

Watch the clip above via CBS News’s 60 Minutes.

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