Esper: Sending special forces to find enriched uranium in Iran would be 'very perilous' mission |
Esper: Sending special forces to find enriched uranium in Iran would be ‘very perilous’ mission
Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said late Monday that any U.S. military mission to secure Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium would be “very perilous.”
President Trump has reportedly expressed serious interest in deploying a small contingent of U.S. troops inside Iran to secure some 900 pounds of the nuclear material at a later stage of the war.
But such an operation would be “very perilous, very dangerous,” and would take a large force, Esper, Trump’s third Pentagon chief in his first term, told NewsNation’s Elizabeth Vargas.
“Then if you find it where you think it is, what do you do with it? What do you do with it? How do you move 900 pounds of uranium?” he added.
Esper suggested that the U.S. instead keep pressure on Iran externally to get them to come to the table and agree to no nuclear enrichment, turning over the 900 pounds of material and allow inspections of its facilities.
“What happens if they say no? Well, then [Trump] has to decide whether he’s going to keep the pressure on them militarily or accept something less than what brought us into the conflict,” the former defense secretary added.
To protect or seize Iran’s nuclear material would almost certainly require U.S. or Israeli troops to enter the Middle East nation and its heavily fortified underground facilities, and only after threats from Tehran are deemed sufficiently neutralized.
Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Saturday that ground troops were possible but only “for a very good reason.”
He added that any scenario where U.S. troops are deployed to the region would require confidence that Iran’s forces can no longer mount a serious attack.
“If we ever did that, [the Iranians] would be so decimated that they wouldn’t be able to fight on the ground level,” he said at the time.
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