Trump Says No Ground Troops Needed to Secure Iran’s Uranium

President Donald Trump said on Friday that Iran has agreed to surrender its stockpile of near-weapons-grade enriched uranium, and the Iranians are evidently willing to deliver the material to inspectors, ensuring it will not be necessary to send in U.S. ground forces to secure it.

Trump told CBS News on Friday that Iran has “agreed to everything” he demanded, including a permanent halt to uranium enrichment, plus a halt to all support for proxy terrorist forces such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“No ground troops will be required to remove enriched uranium from Iran,” Trump told CBS Senior White House Correspondent Weijia Jiang. President Trump had previously suggested sending in U.S. special forces troops to secure or destroy Iran’s uranium stockpile.

Trump told several other media outlets on Friday that Tehran has “agreed to hand over its enriched uranium supply.”

“We’re going to get ‌it together. We’re going to go in with Iran, at a nice leisurely pace, and go down and start excavating with big machinery,” the president told Reuters in a telephone interview on Friday.

“I think ​the deal will ⁠go very quickly. We’re getting along very well with Iran,” he added.

As he has done on several previous occasions, Trump referred to Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile as “nuclear dust,” suggesting he believes the uranium was pulverized and buried when the United States bombed Iran’s three major uranium enrichment facilities in June 2025.

Some military analysts more specifically believe that Iran’s uranium stockpile was hidden at the uranium enrichment facility near the city of Isfahan, one of the three sites bombed into rubble by the U.S. in June.

Iran has refused to comply with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors on the condition and whereabouts of its uranium. The IAEA has estimated that Iran has about 400 kilograms of uranium that was enriched far beyond any conceivable civilian use, but just below the threshold for nuclear weapons.

After weeks of denials, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi admitted on March 14 that he told U.S. negotiators that Iran had enough enriched material to create multiple nuclear warheads if the enrichment process was taken through the final stage. Araghchi said Iran had 440 kilograms of 60 percent enriched uranium, which is close to the IAEA estimate.

President Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said the last round of nuclear negotiations with Iran collapsed after Tehran’s representatives boasted of having enough enriched uranium to make “eleven nuclear bombs.” The U.S.-Israeli air campaign against Iran, known as Operation Epic Fury in the United States, began shortly after Iran made that claim.