60 MINUTES REPORT: To Seize Iran’s Uranium, U.S. Would Need Thousands of Troops, Expert Warns

A leading nuclear expert is warning that any U.S. effort to physically seize Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium would be far more complex — and far more dangerous — than past operations, potentially requiring a massive military deployment deep inside the country.

Speaking on 60 Minutes Sunday, Andrew Weber, who helped orchestrate the covert removal of more than 1,300 pounds of highly enriched uranium from Kazakhstan after the collapse of the Soviet Union, said replicating such a mission in Iran would be on an entirely different scale.

That earlier operation, which transported nuclear material to the United States, took roughly 30 personnel and six weeks to complete. But Weber made clear that Iran presents a dramatically more hostile and fortified environment.

“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.”

The material in question is believed to be stored at the Isfahan nuclear facility, a heavily fortified site where uranium is reportedly kept in container-sized canisters buried deep inside underground tunnel networks. According to the report, those tunnels may be so deep that even America’s most powerful bunker-busting munitions could struggle to reach them.

The warnings come as questions continue to swirl over the true extent of damage inflicted on Iran’s nuclear program during U.S. and Israeli strikes last year.

Matthew Bunn, a former White House nuclear adviser, directly challenged claims that the program had been “completely obliterated.”

“You can’t say that a program that still has enough nuclear material for a bunch of nuclear bombs is ‘obliterated,’” Bunn said. While acknowledging that the strikes significantly degraded Iran’s capabilities, he emphasized that critical elements remain intact. “You can’t bomb away their knowledge.”

At the center of concern is an estimated stockpile of nearly 1,000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60% purity — just a short technical step away from weapons-grade. According to Bunn, that quantity could be further refined into material sufficient for roughly 10 to 11 nuclear weapons.