Uranium
While Trump role-plays ‘imperial conqueror’ without a stateable plan, weaponizable Iranian uranium is sitting in a bunker, waiting for first takers
A central lie in the U.S. president’s pack of untruths about the ineptly planned, globally destabilizing, and evidently open-ended war on Iran is that the Middle Eastern nation was just about to build a nuclear bomb. That Iran was on the threshold of making one. That major metropolitan cities were about to be struck.
Absolute bullshit. No credible nuclear watchdog on the planet has assessed anything of the kind. Scientific American published its take, saying as much, last week. This was also the assessment of none other than Tulsi Gabbard, the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, who appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 18, 2026, to discuss precisely such a thing: clear and present threats against the United States.
It’s just that, presumably taking a note from what she saw happen to former Director of Homeland Security Kristi Noem after her own Senate hearing—at which Noem, the dog killer, said things that displeased Donald J. Trump—Gabbard chose not to say the quiet part out loud.
Instead, in Gabbard’s written opening statement—but, remarkably, not in her spoken statement before the Senate—she described Iran’s nuclear enrichment program as having been “obliterated” by last year’s U.S.-Israel-conducted Operation Midnight Hammer. She noted there had been “no efforts since then to try to rebuild [Iran’s] enrichment capability.”
Yet, appearing before the Senate committee on March 18, Gabbard delivered a different opening statement. She skipped the parts that contradicted the president’s they’re-gonna-nuke-us justification for starting the Iran war. When Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia asked why she hadn’t read the existing opening passage aloud, Gabbard said she “recognized that time was running long.” Warner’s reply was brisk: “So you chose to omit the parts that contradict the president.”
It is absolutely true that Iran has stockpiled enriched uranium and that it was on its way to reaching weapons-grade material. What is also true, and Gabbard herself wrote this down in a discoverable document, is that Iran’s plan had been more than meaningfully disrupted due to the devastating bombing campaigns in 2025.
Furthermore, what is also true is that Iran then went on to present a plan to fully dispose of its uranium entirely in February 2026. A major diplomatic solution was on the table. All the United States had to do was say “yes.”
Oman's foreign minister, Badr al-Busaidi, who was mediating between Washington and Tehran, told CBS's Face the Nation that Iran had proposed, on February 26, 2026—less than 48 hours before the new round of bombs fell—to eliminate its stockpiling of enriched uranium, to downblend what remained to the lowest level possible, to convert it into reactor fuel, and to allow full International Atomic Energy Agency oversight. Al-Busaidi said he believed there was agreement in principle on the downblending. The Arms Control Association, which reviewed recordings of special envoy Steve Witkoff's post-attack press briefings with reporters, confirmed the proposal's terms and noted it was an opening offer—not Iran's bottom line.
That offer was the very last gesture, in fact, of Iran's talks with the inconceivably assigned and critically unqualified team. Take Jared Kushner, for instance—the grifting son-in-law to Trump who, as the New York Times reported last week, has been seeking to raise $5 billion or more for his private equity firm Affinity Partners in the Middle East while simultaneously serving as a U.S. diplomatic envoy. Consider, alongside Kushner, the clown-car commander Witkoff, America's mouthbreathing "special envoy" to the Middle East—he's actually just a real-estate developer who's been friends with Trump since the 1980s—who, as the Arms Control Association documented, also apparently has trouble identifying nuclear reactors with any accuracy.
Witkoff and Kushner rejected the plan. They were reportedly unable to distinguish between Iran’s opening position and its bottom line, and demonstrably unable to understand the basics of nuclear energy and infrastructure. Indeed, the Arms Control Association, working from recordings of Witkoff’s post-attack press briefings, documented that he called enrichment facilities “industrial reactors,” expressed surprise that Iran manufactures centrifuges, and treated a routine stockpile of reactor fuel assemblies as a secret weapons cache.
In the end, neither buffoon appeared to understand what the proposed Iranian downblending deal would mean for a successful diplomatic outcome. That may well be because both men were actually tasked with running interference and conducting delay tactics while Trump and Israel’s murderous and out-of-control Benjamin Netanyahu cooked up the first act of what people rightly worry may be World War III. Or, it may be because they’re both narcissistic idiots without the experience or inclinations to negotiate a peaceful solution to anything, anywhere, at any time.
In any case, the Iran deal was dismissed the very night before Israeli and U.S. warplanes went to work. And now, the unnecessary and incredibly costly air-and-rocket war in the Middle East, with the Pentagon requesting $200 billion to keep it going, grinds into the third week of its newest phase. There has been no consistent or rational objective stated. Iran is doing exactly what every previous military model said it would do—i.e., attempting to light up the whole region with barrages of rocketfire. And all that partially enriched Iranian uranium is still sitting somewhere under sand and rock, waiting for the first taker to dig it out.
A quick rundown of what’s down there. Before the June 2025 strikes, Iran held roughly 441 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity, according to the IAEA—enough, if further enriched, to fuel approximately 10 nuclear weapons. Weapons-grade uranium requires enrichment to 90 percent, however, which is a step Iran’s destroyed centrifuge infrastructure could no longer accomplish after the bombs fell, as Scientific American confirmed in its expert survey last week.
The IAEA, which has been unable to inspect the bombed sites since Iran suspended cooperation in mid-2025, says no movement of the material has been detected. Its best working assumption about the location is the tunnel complex in Isfahan, which appears to be the one major nuclear site not badly damaged in last year’s strikes. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi told reporters in Washington this week that around 200 kilograms of the 60 percent material was held at Isfahan as of the agency’s last inspection, with a lesser amount at Natanz. Reuters confirmed his assessment this week.
If that uranium remains in the hands of a surviving hardline Iranian government—one that, as the Carnegie Endowment’s George Perkovich put it, “needs it more than ever” after 18 days of American and Israeli bombing—the threat calculus is dire, with, as Harvard nuclear specialist Matthew Bunn told the New York Times, “a weakened but embittered regime, possibly more determined than ever to make a nuclear bomb—and still with the material and much of the knowledge and equipment needed to do so.”
One way or another, that uranium needs to be found. There are probably three options for dealing with the stockpile. All three are now closed or getting the presidential punt.
The diplomatic path fell off the table on February 26, thanks to the twits running Dungeons & Dragons diplomacy for Trump’s distraction play. And then Russia, of course, got involved. Vladimir Putin proposed to Trump, in a phone call earlier in March, that Iran’s uranium be transferred to Russia—a move Russia had executed under Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, and for which it has the technical capacity to repeat. Trump said no, per Axios, which obtained that account from U.S. officials. “This is not the first time it was offered,” one official told the outlet. “It hasn’t been accepted.” If Trump’s mindset is to out-Putin his Russian frenemy-daddy, this kind of behavior squares with that goal.
Third, and possibly the only move left on the board, there is the prospect of military seizure.
Under this scenario, U.S. special forces dig through the Iranian rubble, locate the uranium, and bring it out. Retired Admiral James Stavridis described the scale as “potentially the largest special forces operation in history,” per the Wall Street Journal. Former National Security Council official Richard Nephew put the personnel requirement at upward of 1,000 troops per site. Army Rangers would be needed to hold a perimeter. Heavy excavation equipment would be needed to tunnel through tons of debris, adding logistical complexity well beyond that of any recent lightning-strike operation, per both the Journal and the Associated Press.
What makes it more exciting that the man currently presiding over a lawsuit-locked, half-decimated White House is handling such a process is that Iran’s uranium was most likely stored in pressurized canisters of uranium hexafluoride gas—mobile enough to be moved, and dangerous enough that, if the canisters were breached, the escaping gas would be both toxic and radioactive. Should any of those Iranian canisters rupture during extraction, the escaping gas could trigger a nuclear criticality event, an uncontrolled fission chain reaction that, as former Los Alamos chemist Cheryl Rofer described to Scientific American, wouldn’t cause an explosion but would produce “a blue flash and a lot of released neutrons,” lethal to everyone in the vicinity.
But, hey, it’s the Trump regime on the job. What could go wrong?
At the same time, according to Haaretz reporting, the nominal leaders of Israel’s so-called Defense Forces have declined to say whether uranium removal is even a war objective. Trump, as of last week, told Fox News Radio that such an operation is “not” his current focus — “but at some point, we might be.”
There is no question in any reasonable person’s mind that the United States partnering with Israel to wage war on regional enemies has been—and is—a deeply cynical undertaking. In fact, the war in Iran was decided upon by a U.S. president who’s increasingly been on the political ropes domestically since at least January 2026. The Epstein pressure cooker continues to swell. Even two of Trump’s own Supreme Court appointees—Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch—voted with the court’s majority in February to strike down his signature tariff regime as exceeding a president’s legal authority, provoking Trump to blast them on Truth Social for going “out of their way to prove how ‘honest,’ ‘independent,’ and ‘legitimate’ they are.” The baby will cry.
A violent spectacle was precisely what the beleaguered buffoon wanted. And so, Trump has again successfully altered the world’s headlines. Of course, he had the ordnance required to do so. He used it. And, as usual, America has let this age-old tactic work. A nation of deeply compromised people.
What is also the case is that the Iranian uranium in question is a threat to humanity. It must be secured, lest the world concedes that a mushroom cloud over what used to be a major city—or a toxic radioactive attack via one of those gas-filled canisters—is a reality ready to be explored. Maybe that’s the case. Perhaps this is further evidence of a species-wide suicide pact.
On the other hand, for those Americans hoping for a less terminal turnout, the time to secure the Iranian uranium is now. Unhappily, the United States is now locked into an outcome that sensible people did not create, but which sensible people must step in to resolve. The only viable outcome to get the uranium appears to be using troops on the ground to do so. Meanwhile, the man responsible for this devil’s bargain is posting on Truth Social, leaving the planet to wait for a plan to materialize.
