WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Donald Trump faces perhaps the most daunting question in the war with Iran, one that could define his term: Will he send U.S. troops on the ground in Iran to secure some 970 pounds of enriched uranium that Tehran could potentially use to make nuclear weapons?
Trump has offered changing reasons for starting the war, but he has consistently asserted that one of the main goals of Israel's military participation in the military action was to ensure that Iran "will never have a nuclear weapon."
The president has been more circumspect about how far he is willing to go to follow through on his promise to destroy Iran's weapons program once and for all, including seizing or destroying the near-bomb-grade nuclear materials Iran possesses.
Much of it is believed to be buried under the rubble of a mountain facility hit by U.S. bombings ordered by Trump last June, claiming he had "wiped out" Tehran's nuclear program.
It is a risky and complicated project that many nuclear experts say cannot be accomplished without a significant deployment of U.S. troops to Iran, a dangerous and politically fraught operation for the Republican president, who has vowed not to drag the United States into the kind of protracted, bloody conflicts in the Middle East that still weigh heavily on the American psyche.
At the same time, lawmakers and experts remain concerned that if Iranian hardliners emerge from the fighting, they will be more motivated than ever to build nuclear weapons as they seek to deter the United States and Israel from future military action, a dynamic that makes the takeover of Iranian enriched uranium even more critical. This stockpile could allow Iran to build up to 10 nuclear bombs if it decides to militarize its program.
Some lawmakers, like Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, say they deeply fear that the president has put the nation on a path that will require sending troops to Iran for what he called Trump's confused and chaotic goals.
"Some of the goals he continues to advocate for simply cannot be achieved without a physical presence there: securing uranium cannot happen without a physical presence," said Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Meanwhile, Trump's Republican allies point out that there are plans in place to deal with enriched uranium. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman James Risch, Republican of Idaho, cited Wednesday "a number of plans that have been put on the table." He declined to give further details.
Others acknowledged the complications of deploying troops to Iran.
"No one has explained to me how to do this without troops on the ground," said Sen. Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "That doesn't mean you can't. But no one ever informed me about it."
Scott added that it was not tenable to allow the stock to remain: "I think it would be helpful to get rid of it."
Trump and his advisers are not transparent about uranium deliberations
Nearly three weeks into a conflict that has left hundreds dead, tested long-standing alliances and strained the global economy, Trump and his top advisers have failed to be transparent about their deliberations over Iran's uranium stockpile.
"I'm not going to talk about it," Trump said last week when asked about enriched uranium. "But we hit them harder than almost any other country in history, and we're not done yet."
Later in the day, during an appearance in Kentucky, Trump appeared to claim that the strikes had already neutralized the threat. "They don't have nuclear potential," he said.
Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters earlier this week that the administration sees no point in telegraphing "what we're willing to do or how far we're willing to go" while asserting "we have options, for sure."
Experts say it's doable but won't be easy
Richard Goldberg, who served as director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction at the National Security Council during Trump's first term, said seizing or destroying enriched uranium was certainly feasible if the president decided to take that route.
U.S. and Israeli forces have made great strides toward creating the conditions -- namely, establishing total air superiority -- that would allow special operations forces operators trained to detonate centrifuges and handle nuclear materials to conduct such an operation.
To be sure, a troop effort on the ground would have to be far more complicated than other recent large-scale insertion blitzes, such as the January capture of Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro or the May 2011 assassination of Osama bin Laden, Goldberg said. And the likely need to remove rubble to access the enriched uranium canisters adds another layer of complexity, as it would require heavy construction equipment.
"But if you actually own the airspace and you can have close air support and drones and everything else in the sky over a wide enough perimeter, you could probably do a lot," said Goldberg, who is now a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington think tank.
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, told reporters in Washington this week that much of the enriched uranium is believed to remain at the trio of Iranian nuclear sites bombed last year by the United States.
"The impression we have... is that they haven't been moved," Grossi said, adding that much of the material is under the rubble of Iran's Isfahan facility, while smaller amounts are at the Natanz and Fordow facilities that were destroyed in last year's U.S. strikes.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Sunday during an appearance on CBS's "Face the Nation" that Iran had offered to dilute its enriched uranium stockpiles during his talks with Trump negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, which failed to reach an agreement shortly before the United States and Israel began bombing.
Testifying before a Senate committee on Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in prepared remarks that U.S. attacks on Iran had "wiped out" Iran's nuclear enrichment program and buried underground facilities.
Gabbard said the United States was monitoring whether Iran's leaders would try to restart its nuclear program but said it had not attempted to rebuild its nuclear enrichment capacity. She added that the clerical authority overseeing the Iranian government has been degraded by Israeli strikes against its leaders but remains intact.
Brandan Buck, a senior foreign policy fellow at the Cato Institute, said an effort to extract or dilute the enriched material would likely require more than 1,000 troops at each Iranian site and take time.
On the other hand, failing to act to secure enriched uranium also carries risks. If Iranian hardliners remain in power and have enriched equipment, they will now be more motivated to build a nuclear weapon.
"Trump has put himself between a rock and a hard place," Buck said. "Throughout this, he had maximalist goals, but he wanted to maintain minimal effort in order to keep costs low."