What it could take for the U.S. to remove highly enriched uranium from Iran

60 Minutes - Newsmakers What it could take for the U.S. to remove highly enriched uranium from Iran .chip { background-image: url('/fly/bundles/cbsnewscore/images/chip-bgd/chip-bgd-60-minutes.jpg'); } By Cecilia Vega, Cecilia Vega 60 Minutes Correspondent Cecilia Vega is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and "60 Minutes" correspondent who joined the CBS newsmagazine in 2023. Read Full Bio Cecilia Vega, Graham Messick, Michael Karzis April 19, 2026 / 7:00 PM EDT / CBS News Add CBS News on Google The fate of the war between Iran and America hangs on just three letters: HEU — highly enriched uranium — an essential ingredient for nuclear weapons. It's believed Iran currently has enough HEU to eventually make 10 atomic bombs. But international inspectors have not been allowed to verify Iran's stockpile since last June, when the U.S. and Israel struck three nuclear sites.Over the last seven weeks of war, President Trump has insisted the U.S. will take whatever is left, whether with boots on the ground fighting their way in or striking a deal with the Iranian regime to allow scientists to safely secure the stockpile and bring it back to the United States. What you may not know — that option has been done before — in a high-stakes mission that could become the blueprint for how to get HEU out of Iran.Andrew Weber: It was a crazy time after the Soviet Union fell apart and we knew that Iran was pursuing nuclear material throughout the region. In 1994, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Andrew Weber was a young foreign service officer in the newly-minted country of Kazakhstan, which held the fourth largest nuclear arsenal in the world. Left behind by the Soviets, part of it was sitting inside a factory.Andrew Weber: We knew about the factory. We knew it had a purpose in the nuclear power sector. What we didn't know was that they had a cache of highly enriched uranium that was weapons-usable. Andrew Weber 60 Minutes It took several months,...