The U.S. military has given the president a plan to seize nearly 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium in Iran that would involve flying in excavation equipment and building a runway for cargo planes to take the radioactive material out, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The complex plan was briefed to the president in the past week after he asked for a proposal, they said, as were its significant operational risks.
Trump’s request for the plan, previously unreported, signals his interest in contemplating what would be an unusually sensitive and high-stakesspecial operations mission. The administration’s consideration of such an operation was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Limiting Iran’s capacity to build a nuclear weapon remains a top goal of the administration. But this plan, experts say, would represent an enormously difficult endeavor of a type never before attempted during wartime. The mission would require the airlift of potentially hundreds or thousands of troops and heavy equipment to support the excavation and recovery of radioactive material. That could take weeks, former defense officials have estimated, and take place under fire deep inside Iran.
Administration officials recently presented Iran with a 15-point proposal to end the war by reportedly demanding, among other things, that Tehran relinquish its highly enriched uranium – what Trump has called “nuclear dust.”
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