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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have issued a new demand that Iran forfeit its uranium stockpile, or else face renewed attacks or a ground operation by the U.S. and Israel — a threat levied just hours after the start of a fragile temporary ceasefire on Tuesday.
When asked if the U.S. has plans to force Iran to hand over its enriched uranium, Hegseth said in a press conference on Wednesday that “it’s always been non-negotiable that they won’t have nuclear capabilities.”
“They’ll give it to us voluntarily, we’ll get it. We’ll take it. We’ll take it out. Or if we have to do something else like we did in Midnight Hammer or something like that, we reserve that opportunity,” said Hegseth, referring to the U.S.’s bombing of Iran during Israel’s 12-day war last year.
Later, when asked again, he said, “we’ll take it if we have to. We can do it in any means necessary. That’s something that the president is going to have to solve for.”
Netanyahu also demanded on Wednesday that all of Iran’s enriched uranium — which Iranian officials have long insisted is used only for civilian purposes — exits the country “either through agreement, or by renewed fighting.”
This comes after conflicting reports on whether or not Iran would be allowed to enrich uranium as part of the ceasefire agreement. The Associated Press reported that “acceptance of enrichment” was part of the Farsi-language version of the agreement, but not the English one, while the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said in a statement that the U.S. has violated the agreement by denying Iran’s right to enrichment.
Trump declared in a Truth Social post on Wednesday, meanwhile, that “[t]here will be no enrichment of Uranium,” in Iran. He added that “the United States will, working with Iran, dig up and remove all of the deeply buried (B-2 Bombers) Nuclear ‘Dust,’” using a term that he seemingly invented himself.
It’s unclear exactly what the administration is demanding from Iran, or whether or not it is threatening a ground operation.
Reporting has found that options for a ground operation have indeed been prepared for the White House — and would be disastrous. The Washington Post reported last week that the U.S. military, at the request of Trump, has drawn up a plan for a special operations team to infiltrate deep into Iran and raid its uranium stockpiles.
The plan would involve hundreds, if not thousands, of troops to work in secret in Iran to recover radioactive material that’s buried deep underground, behind layer upon layer of security, while other specialized operatives build a runway so that the uranium can be loaded onto a cargo plane and flown out of the country. Experts said that the plan is incredibly far-fetched and unprecedented in scale, slated to take weeks while other special operations missions are measured in hours or minutes.
The demand for all enriched uranium to exit Iran has seemingly not previously been discussed publicly by the Trump administration, until Trump began floating the idea in recent days. “We want no enrichment, but we also want the enriched uranium,” Trump said to CNN in late March.
The demands put even more strain on an already fragile temporary ceasefire agreement that Israel has already been accused of breaking after launching a blitz across Lebanon on Wednesday, killing hundreds without warning. Iran state media reported that Iran had closed the Strait of Hormuz once again in response to the strikes.
“The Iran–U.S. Ceasefire terms are clear and explicit: the U.S. must choose — ceasefire or continued war via Israel. It cannot have both,” said Iran Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi after the attacks. “The world sees the massacres in Lebanon. The ball is in the U.S. court, and the world is watching whether it will act on its commitments.”
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