According to a report by Fox News from 2:52, on Friday April 17, 2026, Military experts are weighing in on the aftermath of recent strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, emphasizing that the United States maintains the necessary leverage to ensure enriched uranium remains contained deep underground.
Retired U.S. Navy Intelligence Officer Captain Todd Sawhill, who spent over 25 years advising on Middle East operations at CENTCOM and the Fifth Fleet, highlighted that while the process of securing or extracting material will be lengthy, the strategic environment has shifted in favor of U.S. monitoring efforts.
Speaking on the challenges of dealing with hundreds of pounds of weapons-grade uranium currently buried beneath destroyed sites, Sawhill noted that the current lack of significant aerial threats allows for unprecedented oversight.
“It will take time,” Sawhill stated. “One of the things that we have on our side that we didn’t necessarily have in some of the planning phases is with the localized air superiority that we have and a fairly benign environment from a threat perspective, particularly for some of our intelligence collection assets.”
This shift in the operational landscape provides U.S. forces with a clearer window into activities at the damaged sites, even if constant surveillance isn’t always possible.
“It will give us more capacity to see what’s happening at those sites on a fairly frequent level,” Sawhill explained. “We won’t have necessarily 24/7 persistence, but we will see what is going on and have better insight into what they are trying to do and how to unearth it.”
The retired captain emphasized that the U.S. retains a Plan B if monitoring reveals any attempts to move or weaponize the “dust” remaining in the mountains.
“If it looks like they will do something untoward with the material, then we have the option to restrike if we need to, to keep the material (Uranium) at least safe where it is buried underneath those mountains,” Sawhill concluded. Read_More…