There Is One Crucial Reason We’re Talking About Boots on the Ground

By W.J. Hennigan and Massimo Calabresi

Mr. Hennigan writes about national security for Opinion. Mr. Calabresi is an Opinion editor at large.

Somewhere in the mountains of Iran lies a hidden stockpile that is poised to define the future of America’s war against the theocratic regime: 18 to 20 scuba-tank-like canisters, each of which contains up to 55 pounds of highly enriched uranium, the main material for making a nuclear weapon.

Iran spent decades and billions of dollars amassing that material, prompting Democratic and Republican presidents alike to insist America would do whatever was necessary to prevent Iran from getting a bomb. Iran’s nuclear program has been severely damaged by U.S.-led air attacks over the past nine months. American officials and experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency believe the uranium has nonetheless survived.

The latest conflict, deliberately or otherwise, has forced the uranium issue to the fore, setting off a showdown over Iran’s nuclear future and a scramble to secure its components. If President Trump ends the war without getting control of the canisters, Iran will almost certainly speed toward going nuclear. Grabbing it, on the other hand, would entail huge risk and the inevitable deployment of American or Israeli ground forces.

“They have to deal with this,” said David Albright, the dean of Iran nuclear analysts and founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, a think tank. The stockpile gives whoever emerges in power after the war “a residual nuclear weapons capability,” he said.

That leaves no good options for a very urgent problem. The United States and Israel could dispatch special forces teams, with nuclear experts embedded in them, in the hope of finding, securing and removing or destroying the canisters, perhaps with the help of local insurgents. There have been few attempts to secure a nuclear program in the middle of a war, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see how things could go terribly wrong.

The other approach is diplomatic. Weeks of bombing might force Iran to surrender its enriched uranium and other elements of its program. Intermediaries from Oman suggested recently that Iran might be willing to go this route, but that was before the latest attacks began. This is also not a new idea. One way or the other, America and Iran have been negotiating over this question for more than a decade.

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W.J. Hennigan writes about national security, foreign policy and conflict for the Opinion section.

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