Two weeks into a war Donald Trump said he launched to ensure that Iran would “never have a nuclear weapon”, the US has no plan to retrieve the enriched uranium stockpile Tehran would need to make an atomic bomb.
“Not at all. We are not focused on that,” the president told Fox News Radio on Friday. He added: “At some point, we might be.”
The conflicting messages have riled the president’s allies and critics, who have questioned the veracity of the administration’s claims about the war — from its rationale to its conduct.
Trump has said “over and over and over again that a goal of the war is to permanently deny Iran the ability to have nuclear weapons”, Democratic senator Chris Murphy said in Congress this week.
But in “closed-door briefings, we learned that is, in fact, not a goal of the war plan; that it is not a goal of the war to destroy their nuclear programme”, he added.
This was not surprising, Murphy said, “because you cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear programme from the air. You cannot destroy knowledge. You cannot hunt down with missiles every single Iranian scientist that knows how to build a nuclear reactor.”
Experts believe that the US and Israel’s bombing campaign in Iran in June severely degraded the country’s nuclear programme and its capacity to enrich uranium.
But they also say it left Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium — the 440kg that it has processed close to weapons-grade — buried so far underground that it will be exceedingly difficult to remove. Iran has said it is under the rubble, but its fate remains a concern for the west.
“The problem is that they have, by most people’s account, some 900 pounds of enriched uranium that is still around,” said John Tierney, executive director of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.
“I think that would be the thing that people would be most concerned about.”
An operation to reach the material buried at Isfahan and at other sites would need a sizeable number of ground troops, he said.
Then there’s the question: “How do you get 900 pounds [of uranium] safely out of Iran?”
Trump said this week that the war — which has sparked a wider regional conflict and turmoil in global energy markets — would end “very soon”. He also said the administration has so far found no reason to deploy ground troops.
The uncertain fate of Iran’s stockpile reinforces a deepening impression that the US has entered a conflict with no clear aims or exit strategy. Trump and administration officials have, at turns, framed the offensive as a war for regime change, to address an imminent threat and even as a means to get ahead of an Iranian response to a unilateral Israeli attack.
As oil prices have hit economically perilous levels in recent days, the administration has also sought to reassure rattled markets with claims that the military campaign would eventually make global energy supplies more secure and more affordable.
But officials have long held Iran’s alleged pursuit of a nuclear weapon as a key motivator.
“We are engaged in a military operation to ensure, as the president has said repeatedly, that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon,” vice-president JD Vance told an audience of supporters in North Carolina on Friday.
Trump has repeatedly framed the war as necessary because of Tehran’s refusal to “renounce” its nuclear ambitions during talks with the US, which claims Iran was rebuilding its programme.
His lead negotiator Steve Witkoff warned last month that Iran was “two weeks” away from obtaining a nuclear weapon — a claim that Tierney and other experts have rubbished as ill informed.
“My information is that there was pretty much an agreement by Iran to do something to degrade that enriched uranium,” Tierney said. But Witkoff “didn’t quite understand . . . what was on the table”.
Iran has always publicly insisted that its programme is for peaceful purposes. The country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the war, issued a fatwa against the pursuit of a nuclear weapon more than two decades ago.
A former senior US intelligence official told FT that they “didn’t get the sense . . . that Iran was on the cusp of some breakthrough” in its nuclear programme.
Experts say a large volume of highly enriched uranium is necessary to build a nuclear weapon. So intelligence analysts have long looked at the size of Iran’s stockpile to assess how close the Islamic republic was to obtaining a nuclear weapon, the former official said.
Under the Obama-era nuclear deal, known as the JCPOA, Iran agreed to ship the vast majority of its enriched uranium to Russia and it submitted to strict inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran began replenishing its stockpile after Trump pulled out of the JCPOA during his first term in office.
“With the increase in the stockpile, all of a sudden it made it theoretically possible that even things like US World War II [era] nuclear designs were now viable because you had enough enriched uranium,” the former intelligence official explained.
For that reason, “getting the stock of the enriched uranium out of the country” is a “big deal”, the official said. If the US really was concerned that Iran was so close to a bomb, it would have necessitated a strategy that addresses taking control of the uranium stockpile.
US legislators briefed on the war effort said they had been given no indication that securing the uranium was on the agenda.
“I’ve gone to all the briefings,” Democrat senator Ron Wyden, who sits on the Senate intelligence committee, told the FT. “And I leave scratching my head [because] it doesn’t seem like people thought much about that.”
The IAEA reported recently that the entrance to Iran’s underground nuclear facility at Natanz, heavily bombed in June, sustained more damage early in the US and Israel’s new war.
The Israeli military said this week that it had hit two nuclear sites during its bombing campaign this month, including the Minzadehei compound where it alleged scientists had worked to “develop a key component for nuclear weapons” and the Taleghan compound, which it said was “utilised to develop advanced explosives and to conduct sensitive experiments” as part of a “covert nuclear weapon development programme in the 2000s”.
The US military has not mentioned any targets, among the 6,000 so far, that have been connected to Iran’s nuclear programme or stockpile.
In two factsheets released this week about “Operation Epic Fury”, US Central Command said the targets have included command and control centres, communications systems, missile, drone and minelaying assets, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Navy.
On Friday, Trump told Fox News: “Right now, we are focused on knocking the hell out of their missiles and their drones.”
A White House official told the FT that “the United States is effectively meeting or exceeding all of its benchmarks” in Iran and “that includes destroying Iran’s dreams of ever possessing a nuclear weapon”.
Additional reporting by James Shotter in Jerusalem
