Washington, DC: US president Donald Trump is reported to have renewed his plan to send in ground troops into Iran to extract nearly 970 pounds (around 400 kilograms) of enriched uranium.
The US believes that Tehran could potentially use to build nuclear weapons. Trump has asked his advisers to convince Iran to surrender the material as a condition for ending the war, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a source familiar with the US leader’s thinking.
Trump has clearly indicated to US political allies that Tehran can’t keep the nuclear material, and he has discussed “seizing it by force” if Iran does not give it up at the negotiating table, it has been reported.
At the same time, the US president noted that indirect talks between his country and Iran via Pakistani “emissaries” were making progress. “A deal could be made fairly quickly,” he said.
While Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey have acted as mediators between the US and Iran, Washington and Tehran haven’t yet engaged in direct negotiations to end the war.
One of the objectives given by Trump behind the US joining Israel in the military action was to ensure that Iran “never has a nuclear weapon.” However, he has been more circumspect about how far he’s willing to go to follow through on his pledge to destroy Iran’s weapons programme once and for all, including seizing or destroying the near-bomb-grade nuclear material that Iran possesses, as reported by NDTV.
While the US Central Command announced last week that over 3,500 troops, including 2,500 Marines, had arrived in the Middle East, the Pentagon is reportedly planning to deploy up to 10,000 additional ground troops to the Gulf.
Trump threatened war escalation on Sunday evening, saying Iran must do what the US demands or “they’re not going to have a country.”
“They’re going to give us the nuclear dust,” he said, referring to the Uranium.
Before the start of the war, Iran was believed to have more than 400 kilograms of 60 per cent highly enriched uranium and nearly 200 kilograms of 20 per cent fissile material, which can easily be converted into 90 per cent weapons-grade uranium.
However, much of it is now believed to be buried under the rubble of a mountain facility that was bombed by the US and Israel.
The Iranians apparently have centrifuges to enrich uranium and the capability to set up a new underground enrichment site, reports suggest.
Trump and some of his allies have claimed that it would be possible to seize the material in a targeted operation that wouldn’t extend the timeline of the war significantly and still enable the US to be done with the conflict by mid-April, the WSJ report says.
Any such operation by the US would be risky though. Many nuclear experts believe it cannot be done without a sizeable deployment of US troops into Iran.
The potential operation would likely trigger retaliation from Iran and could also lengthen the war well beyond the 4-6 week time frame that Trump’s team has publicly outlined.
Experts also told WSJ that for such an operation, teams of US forces would need to enter the Iranian sites, likely under fire from Tehran’s surface-to-air missiles and drones. Once on site, the US troops would first have to secure perimeters so that engineers, with excavating equipment, could search through debris to eliminate mines and booby traps.
After finding the nuclear material, an elite special operations team would be needed for its extraction. According to the report, the highly enriched uranium is likely contained in 40 to 50 special cylinders that resemble scuba tanks.
