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The vice president said the bombing was a 'success', but reports suggest the reserves may have been moved elsewhere...
US Vice President JD Vance has raised doubts that Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium, estimated at 400 kg (882 lb), which is very close to nuclear weapons level, remains intact despite the recent US bombing campaign against Iran.
The vice president told Fox News that the location of the uranium "is not the question that awaits us" and said the relevant question was: "can Iran enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels and can it turn it into a nuclear weapon?"
Iran's uranium stockpile is believed to be located mainly in Isfahan, where a conversion facility is located that turns uranium into a form that can be fed into centrifuges for enrichment.
However, the head of the UN atomic energy agency, Rafael Grossi, said in recent days that the stockpiles could have been moved. Its inspectors have not been able to visit Iranian nuclear sites since the start of the war.
The US bombed nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan on Saturday in an attempt to destroy Iran's nuclear program, but reports suggest that despite massive physical damage to the sites, the uranium itself has probably been moved elsewhere.
"The goal was to bury the uranium, and I think the uranium has been buried," Vance said.
For the US, he said the aim of the bombings "was to eliminate enrichment and eliminate their ability to turn that enriched fuel into a nuclear weapon. We don't want that 60% enriched uranium to become 90% enriched uranium. That's the real concern."
But Vance insisted it was not a concern that Iran might have moved it and claimed the bombing represented "mission success" because he said Iran no longer had the capacity to convert the stockpile into weapons-grade uranium. "And that was really the goal here," he said.
Former UN nuclear weapons inspector David Albright told CNN on Monday that there are centrifuges that are "unknown" that still need to be addressed for the US mission to be considered successful.
"I think that part of the mission has been accomplished," he said, adding that "the enriched uranium stockpiles are one of them. I would like to see these stocks buried, but we understand that some of them were taken from Iran and we don't know where they are."
Albright added that the issue of remaining, unaccounted for centrifuges meant that "this problem is not over yet, but it is a manageable problem. In part because converting enriched uranium to weapons-grade uranium is not going to be a slow process, it is a fast process."
Asked whether the enriched uranium stockpile had been destroyed, Vance told ABC's This Week program on Sunday that "we will be working in the coming weeks to make sure we do something with that fuel and that is one of the things we will be talking about with the Iranians."
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