Trump Says Recovering Iranian Uranium ‘Will Be a Long and Difficult Process’

WASHINGTON – Former U.S. President Donald Trump stated late Monday that recovering enriched uranium from Iran would be a “long and difficult process,” nearly a year after U.S. strikes targeted the country’s nuclear facilities.

Writing on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump characterized the military action which he dubbed “Operation Midnight Hammer” as devastatingly effective. “Operation Midnight Hammer was a complete and total obliteration of the Nuclear Dust sites in Iran,” he posted. “Therefore, digging it out will be a long and difficult process.”

Trump has consistently used the term “nuclear dust” to refer to Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium, which Washington accuses Tehran of accumulating with the goal of developing an atomic bomb. At other times, he has applied the phrase to the radioactive debris left behind by U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June of last year.

Despite the operational challenges he described, the 79-year-old Republican leader maintained that Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile would ultimately be transferred to U.S. soil. His assertion stands in direct contrast to denials from Iran’s foreign ministry, which has rejected any plans to relinquish the country’s nuclear materials.

The U.S. strikes, carried out in coordination with Israel on February 28, were intended to neutralize what Israeli officials called “the existential threat” posed by Iran’s advancing nuclear program. According to Israeli intelligence assessments cited at the time, Tehran had accelerated its pursuit of a nuclear weapon following the conclusion of a 12-day war last June a conflict initiated by Israel that included American bombing of three nuclear sites, among them a uranium enrichment plant.

Observers note that any effort to extract and remove enriched uranium from heavily damaged or contaminated facilities would indeed pose significant technical, logistical, and radiological safety challenges. International nonproliferation experts have also raised questions about the legality and feasibility of a unilateral U.S. seizure of nuclear materials from Iranian territory.

As of Tuesday, the Biden administration had not commented on Trump’s remarks. Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for further clarification.

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