By Michael R. Gordon and Laurence Norman
The U.S. has hard-earned experience in shipping highly enriched uranium from foreign countries, but it would confront unique challenges in removing nuclear material from Iran, according to former officials and experts outside government.
Transporting nuclear material from the country would involve extracting material from nuclear sites which have been turned to rubble by American and Israeli bombs and missile strikes that international inspectors haven't visited in 10 months. It would also require a political understanding on just where Iran's enriched uranium could be sent.
"It probably would be the most complex uranium removal operation in history," said Andrew Weber, a senior fellow at the Council on Strategic Risks and a former Pentagon official who was involved in past removal operations. "There are a lot of uncertainties because of the U.S. attacks in June, the logistical requirements, security risks and foreign policy tensions."
The fate of Iran's nuclear material is a key sticking point in negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, which President Trump said are set to resume this week, although Iran hasn't publicly confirmed further talks. Trump said on Friday that Iran had agreed to transfer its stockpile of highly enriched uranium to the U.S., a claim that Iran denied within hours.
The country has enough 60% enriched material to fuel around 11 nuclear weapons, and the Trump administration is still insisting that Iran's near-weapons grade enriched uranium be removed to block Tehran's potential pathway to a nuclear weapon. The Journal reported on Friday that the Trump administration was prepared to give Iran access to around $20 billion in locked up overseas funds in exchange for the handover of the stockpile.
Half of the highly enriched material is believed to be in underground tunnels at the nuclear complex at Isfahan and some of it is at the Natanz enrichment site, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Both locations were heavily damaged in last June's strikes on Iran. Tehran reinforced the entrances at Isfahan and Natanz before this year's conflict and recent U.S. or Israeli strikes on Natanz further buried the entry-points, experts say.
There is a precedent for a new agreement to dispose of Iran's enriched uranium in return for a substantial economic reward. More than 11 tons of uranium enriched at levels up to 20% was shipped to Russia as part of the 2015 nuclear deal that lifted punishing economic sanctions against Iran.
That accord limited Iran to a stockpile of less than 300 kilograms of 3.67% enriched uranium for 15 years. But the deal began to unravel after Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018.
Before last June's attacks, Iran had 441 kilograms of 60% highly enriched uranium and around 200 kilograms of 20% enriched uranium, the IAEA says. That material could be enriched up to 90% weapons grade material in a matter of weeks.
Iran isn't currently enriching uranium, and its capability to do so is believed to have been badly damaged by June's attacks. Tehran offered to dilute the 60% highly enriched uranium to at most a 20% level, according to people involved in the talks, which might ease some U.S. concerns and could be justified by Iran as a step to retain the material for civilian purposes. But to firmly shut the door on Iran's prospects for developing nuclear weapons, experts say, the 60% enriched uranium should be shipped out and potentially the 20% enriched uranium as well.
"This stuff has to leave Iran," said Richard Nephew, a former nuclear negotiator with Iran during the Obama and Biden administrations.
The U.S. has considerable experience to draw on if a deal to remove the highly enriched uranium is reached, much of which was gained when Washington sought to guard against the risk of nuclear proliferation following the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The U.S. removed 600 kilograms of 90% highly enriched uranium from a plant in Kazakhstan in a secret 1994 operation dubbed Project Sapphire. A U.S. team spent more than a month in the country, where they repacked the material into more than 440 special shipping containers, which were then loaded onto two huge C-5 transport planes.
The planes were refueled in flight three times so that the nuclear cargo wouldn't need to spend time on foreign airfields before arriving at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. They were the longest C-5 flights in history. After the planes landed, the bomb-grade material was sent in unmarked trucks to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where it was eventually blended down for use in American power reactors.
Four years later, U.S. and British experts removed almost five kilograms of highly enriched uranium from a former Soviet research reactor near Tbilisi, Georgia. The material was flown on a C-5 to a nuclear facility in Scotland.
Building on this and other removal operations in other parts of the world, a "mobile packaging program" was established by the U.S. Energy Department and its nuclear laboratories. Under that program, American nuclear specialists and laboratory equipment, such as X-ray machines, scales and glove boxes for handling dangerous material, can be sent abroad to extract plutonium or highly enriched uranium.
If the U.S. deploys its specialists to Iran, IAEA experts could be called in to confirm the quantity and enrichment levels of the uranium to be removed after it was dug out.
"It would be a very intensive effort that would take weeks, " said Scott Roecker, who previously directed the Energy Department's Office of Nuclear Material Removal and is now at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit security organization.
Because Iran's highly enriched uranium is stored in a gaseous form in heavy cylinders, Roecker said, experts would need to assess if it could be safely transported in that state or would need to be first converted into an oxide powder. Additional problems would arise if some of the buried cylinders of enriched uranium had been damaged. That work could be done using specialized remote equipment, including robots, that can check for the presence of dangerous materials and damage, said David Albright, a former weapons inspector who heads the Institute for Science and International Security.
"There could be some technical challenges with the material itself," Roecker said. "But it could be managed technically. And once you get it into a form that can be shipped, it's pretty straightforward from there."
Another question is where the material would be shipped. Iranian officials have objected to any deal in which the U.S. would get Iran's uranium. Experts say it might be shipped to Russia as was done under the 2015 agreement or perhaps diluted and sold to a commercial company.
Weber said that one alternative would be to fly the material to Kazakhstan, which is the site of the bank of low-enriched uranium that is controlled by the IAEA. Iran's highly enriched uranium could be blended down and then stored at this bank, which provides nations with a way to obtain fuel for nuclear power plants if their supply is disrupted.
Such a deal, if it can be reached, wouldn't put all of the U.S. worries to rest, as Washington would need to guard against the risk that Iran might try to siphon off some of its enriched uranium. Tehran laid the groundwork for that last year by saying some of its fissile material may have been destroyed in June's attacks.
To offset that danger, any new deal negotiated between the U.S. and Iran would need wide-ranging inspection rights, allowing U.S. or international inspectors to take environmental samples in places where Iran could claim that material was destroyed. Those samples should show traces of enriched uranium in the atmosphere if containers had been demolished. That would allow Washington to know if Iran's claims of destroyed material is true.
"The team would need to have a strong mandate to guarantee access to sites and personnel," possibly backed up by the threat of force if Tehran didn't comply, Albright said.
Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 19, 2026 14:00 ET (18:00 GMT)
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