Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Wednesday called on Iran to turn over its stockpile of 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium, saying that President Trump could still order a U.S. commando raid to seize the material, which could be quickly made ready to use in a nuclear device.
The uranium is deeply buried at a site in Isfahan under the rubble from American B-2 bombing strikes last June, and Mr. Trump has said one of the main goals of the Iran war is to ensure Iran never obtains a nuclear weapon.
“We know exactly what they have,” Mr. Hegseth told reporters at a news conference at the Pentagon the day after the United States and Tehran agreed on a two-week cease-fire as a step to negotiate a broader resolution.
“They will either give it to us,” Mr. Hegseth said of the enriched material, “or we’ll take it out.” Such a mission would at a minimum involve hundreds of U.S. Special Operations troops and would come with high risks, current and former commanders say.
When asked exactly how the enriched uranium would be removed, Mr. Hegseth said: “That’s something the president is going to solve.”
At the news conference, Mr. Hegseth and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared that all their military objectives had been achieved in what Mr. Hegseth called “a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield.”
General Caine said the 38-day air campaign by the United States had destroyed 80 percent of Iran’s air defense systems, about 800 storage facilities for one-way attack drones, some 450 ballistic missile storage sites and more than 150 ships. He also said that the campaign had destroyed Iran’s industrial base, meaning it would take years to rebuild.
But before the two-week cease-fire, the battered Iranian military was still capable of firing 15 to 30 ballistic missiles and 50 to 100 one-way attack drones each day, and its forces shot down two American fighter jets last week.
Some experts on Iran’s military said the Pentagon’s focus on bombs dropped missed the larger point of a war with no real strategic aim. “You’re trying to define victory by how many people you killed,” said Vali Nasr, an Iranian expert at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s like a doctor who says, ‘I have a really sharp scalpel.’ ”
Mr. Hegseth was asked about the president’s threat on Tuesday to wipe out a civilization, and whether the American military was ready to do so. He replied: “We had a target set locked and loaded” and proceeded to mention bridges and power plants. Hitting such civilian infrastructure would be war crimes under international law, legal experts have said.
U.S. military officials say they have found some legal wiggle room by arguing that such infrastructure sites are also used by the Iranian military, but most legal experts say that justification is a stretch.
The secretary listed the names of several senior Iranian military leaders killed in the five-week campaign. But Iran’s decentralized command structure — operating under an arguably even more hard-line military command than before the war — has still been able to order attacks against energy infrastructure in neighboring countries and keep the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed to most commercial shipping.
Eric Schmitt is a national security correspondent for The Times. He has reported on U.S. military affairs and counterterrorism for more than three decades.
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