On April 17, President Trump told Reuters that the United States will recover Iran’s enriched uranium in cooperation with Tehran. “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. We’ll bring it back to the United States.”

He referred to the material as “nuclear dust” and said it would be retrieved “very soon.” The statement came on the same day Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz “completely open” for commercial vessels for the remainder of the ceasefire, and as Trump said a second round of U.S.-Iran negotiations could take place this weekend. The mood in Washington is optimistic. The mood in reality is something else.

Here is why none of this adds up.

1. Iran will not surrender its reason for existing

The Islamic Republic has pursued nuclear capability not as a bargaining chip but as a theological mandate. The regime’s foundational ideology rests on the destruction of what it calls the Little Satan and the Great Satan. Israel and the United States are not merely geopolitical adversaries to Tehran. They are eschatological enemies whose elimination is woven into the Shia revolutionary project that has defined the regime since 1979. Surrendering 441 kilograms of enriched uranium would mean renouncing the single most tangible instrument capable of fulfilling that promise.

Iran’s 10-point peace proposal, presented days ago, explicitly demands the right to continue enriching uranium. Mohammad Eslami, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, declared that any attempt to limit enrichment would fail. No regime hands over the material foundation of its deepest ideological commitment at a “leisurely pace” over coffee with the enemy.

2. The uranium is not where Washington says it is

The official U.S. narrative locates the enriched uranium beneath the rubble of Natanz and Fordow, the two facilities struck by B-2 bombers with 30,000-pound bunker busters........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)