04/19/2026: Iran's HEU, One Mother's Story, Wild Concerto

0:00Furniture shopping can be overwhelming. There are so many options and it's hard to know what's actually worth it. That's why I always turn to reviews to guide my decisions. If something has hundreds of five-star reviews, I'm paying attention. And Bob's Discount Furniture has tons of highly rated pieces that make choosing a whole lot easier. Like their Elm Dining Set, which has over 700 five-star reviews. It's a gorgeous setup with a real marble table and comfortable Bobapedic seating that instantly upgrades your dining space. And at$9.99, it's a super approachable way to get that high-end look.

0:42Or check out Bob's Copper Radiance Queen Extra Firm Mattress. Over 400 five-star reviews and recommended by Consumer Reports. It's designed with a copper-infused cover and high-density Bobopedic foam for support. Plus, it comes with a 20-year warranty. And if you're looking for a sofa upgrade, the modular Bob sectional is a customer favorite with over 1 ,000 five-star reviews. It's got soft, durable upholstery, storage, wireless charging, and starts at just$250 per piece so you can customize it without overthinking it. For quality furniture and everyday low prices, shop at Bob's. It's where America shops for furniture.

1:29Imagine you're finally cleaning out your gutters when the smoke alarm starts blaring from inside. Smoke billows out of the window. ADT's affordable DIY systems are built for those moments where everything can change in a second. They're easy to set up, customizable, and help keep your home safe with 24-7 monitoring. No one wants to feel unsafe at home, and with ADT, you won't. ADT prioritizes your peace of mind with the most company-operated monitoring centers in the industry. With the ADT Plus app, you stay in control from virtually anywhere. Don't wait to prepare for an emergency. When every second counts, count on ADT.

2:02Visit ADT.com or call 1-800-ADT-ASAP.

2:13The war with Iran hinges on three letters, H-E-U, and it's believed Iran has enough of it underground to eventually make 10 nuclear bombs. What would it take for the U.S. to secure that highly enriched uranium? Tonight, you'll hear about a covert mission that took place 32 years ago, and why a similar operation in Iran would be so difficult. Would an operation like this be worth risking American lives? In my opinion, yes.

2:47Harsh!

2:50It's mama. Tonight, the story of a mother who would not give up on her son after he was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, 2023. I was always saying, I love you, stay strong, survive. I love you, stay strong, survive. I love you, stay strong, survive. Was it a command to you as well? Yes. If you're a rock fan, you already know Stuart Copeland, acclaimed drummer for the police. What you may not know is who or what he's making music with now. That's the coca-bola. hundreds of animals turned into something wild. You put an instrument with them, and those animals become Pavarotti.

3:39I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelley. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Cecilia Vega. I'm Anderson Cooper. Those stories, and in our last minute, Chef Jose Andres with some food for thought tonight. on 60 Minutes.

4:01Furniture shopping can be overwhelming. There are so many options and it's hard to know what's actually worth it. That's why I always turn to reviews to guide my decisions. If something has hundreds of five-star reviews, I'm paying attention. And Bob's Discount Furniture has tons of highly rated pieces that make choosing a whole lot easier. Like their Elm Dining Set, which has over 700 five-star reviews. It's a gorgeous setup with a real marble table and comfortable Bobapedic seating that instantly upgrades your dining space. And at$9.99, it's a super approachable way to get that high-end look.

4:44Or check out Bob's Copper Radiance Queen extra firm mattress. Over 400 five-star reviews and recommended by Consumer Reports. It's designed with a copper-infused cover and high-density Bob-A-Pedic foam for support. Plus, it comes with a 20-year warranty. And if you're looking for a sofa upgrade, the modular Bob sectional is a customer favorite with over 1 ,000 five-star reviews. It's got soft, durable upholstery, storage, wireless charging, and starts at just$250 per piece so you can customize it without overthinking it. For quality furniture and everyday low prices, shop at Bob's. It's where America shops for furniture.

5:31Imagine you're finally cleaning out your gutters when the smoke alarm starts blaring from inside. Smoke billows out of the window. ADT's affordable DIY systems are built for those moments where everything can change in a second. They're easy to set up, customizable and help keep your home safe with 24 7 monitoring no one wants to feel unsafe at home and with ADT you won't ADT prioritizes your peace of mind with the most company operated monitoring centers in the industry with the ADT plus app you stay in control from virtually anywhere don't wait to prepare for an emergency when every second counts count on ADT visit at ADT.com or call 1-800-ADT-ASAP.

6:09The fate of the war between Iran and America hangs on just three letters, H-E-U, highly enriched uranium, an essential ingredient for nuclear weapons. It's believed Iran currently has enough H-E-U to eventually make 10 atomic bombs. But international inspectors have not been allowed to verify Iran's stockpile since last June, 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.

6:54What 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. 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. We knew about the factory. We knew it had a purpose in the nuclear power sector.

7:44What we didn't know was that they had a cache of highly enriched uranium that was weapons usable. It took several months, but using good old-fashioned diplomacy and a moose hunting trip, Weber built trust with the factory director. And one day, it paid off in the form of a note. And I remember it was one of the first snows that day. And so we're walking in the courtyard, and he said, Andy, I have a message from Vitaly. And he passed me this little note. Let's see. This tiny little piece of paper he hands you. And it says, you 235, 90%, 600 kilograms. And that means what to you? Dozens of nuclear weapons.

8:31Uranium enriched to 90 percent is ready to be made into a bomb. The revelation made it all the way up to President Bill Clinton. Soon, both countries came to an agreement. The U.S. would take the stockpile to prevent countries like Iran and North Korea from getting a hold of it. They could have just bought the 90 % enriched uranium metal and they would have been able to fabricate bombs very quickly out of it. Weber became the point person for the operation codenamed Project Sapphire. He took these pictures with his own camera showing canisters holding more than 1 ,300 pounds of the bomb-grade uranium.

9:12The only thing protecting them was a militia woman with a sidearm and... It was protected by a good padlock, sort of the kind you see in an antique shop. Project SAFIRE was the first of its kind. Three massive C-5 Galaxy cargo planes were dispatched to Kazakhstan, carrying 31 specialists from the Departments of Defense and Energy. The teams brought 450 drums built to transport nuclear cargo, strong enough to survive a plane crash. and the whole thing was covert under the cover of a humanitarian mission. It was all done in utmost secrecy. A team of over 30 people working for about five or six weeks to finish this packaging operation.

10:04It didn't leak and nobody knew they were even there. Every gram of HEU was secured and loaded onto rickety Soviet-era trucks. And that night there was black ice on the roads and the trucks were sliding. That's when the material was most vulnerable. We didn't want the Iranians or organized criminal groups to know that the material was being transported. It was very important that nobody knew that we were going to be moving the material that snowy, cold night. The planes were loaded up and the HEU was flown back to the United States, taken to a Department of Energy complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, for safekeeping.

10:54Weber went on to become an assistant secretary of defense responsible for nuclear deterrence. From touchdown to takeoff, Project SAFIRE took six weeks to remove more than 1 ,300 pounds of bomb-grade uranium from Kazakhstan. on. Would the same mission be possible today in Iran? In Iran, we couldn't send a team in to do this unilaterally without great risk. You would need to set up in the middle of the country a secure perimeter. It would probably take thousands of U.S. troops to secure the facility while our experts excavated the HEU that's located inside deep tunnels at a place called Isfahan.

11:46This is the Isfahan nuclear facility deep in Iran's desert. Under this mountain, international inspectors say most of Iran's HEU is stored in scuba tank-sized containers. It's believed those containers are in tunnels so far below ground America's bunker-busting bombs may not be able to reach them. Satellite images show in the weeks leading up to this current war, the Iranians blocked the tunnel entrances with dirt. Two weeks ago, images showed roadblocks. Nuclear analysts say it suggests Tehran is concerned about a U.S. or Israeli raid on the facility. It's not like Iran hasn't thought about the possibility that we might do this.

12:32But U.S. Special Forces have been training for deep underground facilities of one kind or another for a long, long, long time. Dr. Matthew Bunn is a former White House nuclear advisor who has spent decades trying to prevent nuclear material from falling into the wrong hands. From his perch at Harvard's Belfer Center, he monitors Iran's nuclear activity as best he can. So what you can see from a satellite is what's going on on the surface, right? But what you can't see is anything going on inside buildings, anything going on in other underground facilities. President Trump has said repeatedly that Iran's nuclear program was completely obliterated after the strikes last June.

13:23Yeah, that statement is just not true. You can't say that a program that still has enough nuclear material for a bunch of nuclear bombs is obliterated, unfortunately. There's no doubt that the combination of the strikes in June of last year and the ongoing war have seriously set back Iran's capabilities. But the remaining capabilities are substantial. You can't bomb away their knowledge. UN inspectors believe Iran has close to 1 ,000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60%, nearly ready to be used in a nuclear weapon. 970 pounds of 60 % highly enriched uranium. What can you do with that? So that is enough material for, if you enrich it just a little bit more, for 10 to 11 nuclear bombs.

14:19Nuclear analysts have become increasingly concerned about another site in Iran known as Pickaxe Mountain. Satellite images from February show an entrance to what's believed to be a massive nuclear facility deep under solid rock. Can you bomb your way to Iran's stockpile and get it and remove it? I don't think that there is a lasting, durable solution to Iran's nuclear program through military means. Scott Roker was a top official in the NNSA, a$24 billion agency buried inside the Department of Energy. He left in 2021. If there was a deal between the United States and Iran for the United States to take possession of that material, it would be the National Nuclear Security Administration that would lead that effort.

15:06Roker used lessons learned from Project SAFIRE to remove nuclear material from countries around the world and ship it to the U.S. for safekeeping. So far, the NNSA has removed more than 16 ,000 pounds of HEU. There was agreement in place with the countries, and so that's a really key fact here. You want to have a willing partner who's working with you hand in hand. Cooperation. Exactly. Can it be done without that? I've never seen it done without that. Never in my experience have I seen that. If your phone rang tomorrow and your former colleague said, hey, come back, we're going into Isfahan to package this up and get it out of the country, would you go?

15:50I would go in a heartbeat. This past week, President Trump said Iran agreed to hand over its stockpile, what he calls nuclear dust, as part of a deal to end the war. Hours later, the Iranians insisted their HEU was not going anywhere. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon and we're going to get the dust back. We'll get it back either. We'll get it back from them or we'll take it. Would an operation like this be worth risking American lives? In my opinion, yes. Retired Vice Admiral Robert Harward is a former Navy SEAL and Deputy Director of U.S. Central Command. He led elite special operations in the Middle East and says an operation in Iran could take many weeks and require a large footprint involving all the branches of the military.

16:43It's high risk. You have to occupy territory. You have to confront. You have to force your way in. So all those risks are inherent in that operation. But we can do it. It's been said troops would have to secure a full perimeter around any facility they'd enter. They might have to bring in their own bulldozers to clear rubble, maybe even build their own landing strip in order to pull this off as a successful operation. That's what our military does. When we went into Afghanistan, we built a runway in the desert and we brought in C-17s. What does concern Vice Admiral Harward is the weapons still available to Iran on today's battlefield.

17:29The most prevalent threat is their abilities then to respond with drones, kinetic drones, maybe whatever's left in their inventory of missiles. That's your real threat to your time on the ground in the force. Would you expect casualties in an operation like this? Sure. You have to plan for that. The fragile ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran is set to expire on Wednesday. Dr. Matthew Bunn says any nuclear agreement should not be based on trust but verification. Iran has been lying about its nuclear weapons effort for over 20 years now. They have always claimed our program was 100 percent peaceful.

18:17We were never pursuing nuclear weapons. That's a lie. And then once the international inspectors got in and started finding some things out, the Iranians kept lying to them. What specifically does the United States need Iran to commit to to deal with its nuclear capabilities once and for all? I think the most important thing is no highly enriched uranium and some in-depth monitoring, international monitoring. That's what's most essential, and it's going to be very difficult now, given all of the distrust following this war, following Trump pulling out of talks repeatedly to launch more strikes.

19:03You don't sound very optimistic. I'm not very optimistic. I think we're going to be dealing with Iran's nuclear program with very few realistic tools available to us for a long time to come.

19:23Furniture shopping can be overwhelming. There are so many options and it's hard to know what's actually worth it. That's why I always turn to reviews to guide my decisions. If something has hundreds of five-star reviews, I'm paying attention. And Bob's Discount Furniture has tons of highly rated pieces that make choosing a whole lot easier. Like their Elm Dining Set, which has over 700 five-star reviews. It's a gorgeous setup with a real marble table and comfortable Bobapedic seating that instantly upgrades your dining space. And at$9.99, it's a super approachable way to get that high-end look.

20:05Or check out Bob's Copper Radiance Queen Extra Firm Mattress. over 400 five-star reviews, and recommended by Consumer Reports. It's designed with a copper-infused cover and high-density Bobopedic foam for support. Plus, it comes with a 20-year warranty. And if you're looking for a sofa upgrade, the modular Bob sectional is a customer favorite with over 1 ,000 five-star reviews. It's got soft, durable upholstery, storage, wireless charging, and starts at just$250 per piece so you can customize it without overthinking it. For quality furniture and everyday low prices, shop at Bob's. It's where America shops for furniture.

20:52Imagine you're watching the game at a buddy's house when you get a call that someone tried to break into yours. In a second, everything can change. That's why there's ADT. No one wants to feel unsafe in their own home. ADT Security Systems help keep your home safe with 24-7 monitoring. The ADT Plus app keeps you in control the whole time. ADT's network is built for those game-time moments. They have the most company-operated monitoring centers in the industry. Don't leave your home wide open during an emergency. When every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com or call 1-800-ADT-ASAP. Since Hamas launched a terror attack on Israel two and a half years ago when the war in Gaza began, far too many mothers, Palestinian and Israeli, have lost children.

21:37This is One Mother's Story. Her name is Rachel Goldberg-Pollett. She's an American-Israeli who moved to Jerusalem 18 years ago with her husband John and their three children. Her only son, Hirsch, was badly wounded and taken hostage by Hamas on October 7th. Rachel and John worked tirelessly to bring Hirsch and the other hostages home, but on the 328th day of his captivity, Hirsch was executed in a tunnel in Gaza. Now, like so many others, Rachel Goldberg-Polin is trying to figure out how to live after her child has died. To know that your child is being tortured, tormented, starved, abused, is maimed.

22:23And that's an excruciating form of suffering. And then what's so fascinating to me is that when they came to tell us that Hirsch had been executed, then I realized that those 330 days had been the good part because he was alive. And now I'm in this place, and this is the rest of my life. How do I walk through this place without a piece of me here? Have you figured that out yet? I'm trying to re-understand what it means to be in this world. There are millions of us right now who have buried children. There's nothing unique about me, but it creates light for me to try to give words to the pain. What was Hirsch like?

23:23Easy. Easy. The universe really knew what it was doing when it said, Rachel's going to have one son, so this is the one for her. I was really blessed. Hirsch and his best friend, Anir Shapira, were at the Nova Music Festival near the Gaza border on the morning of October 7th when Hamas terrorists attacked. They slaughtered 378 people and wounded hundreds more. What do you remember about the morning, October 7th? The siren started, and I went and turned on my phone. And at 8-11, two messages had come in from Hirsch. The first one said, I love you, and the second one said, I'm sorry. And that was it.

24:13Everything that had ever happened in my life from the day I was born until that second was over. Hirsch sent those texts from inside this bomb shelter, crammed with more than two dozen people. That's Hirsch against the wall and Aner near the entrance. Hamas came to the doorway and was throwing in hand grenades. on air was picking them up and throwing them out. Picking them up and throwing them out. According to survivors, on air threw back at least 10 grenades. When he was killed, others took his place. In all, 16 people were killed in the shelter. The first survived, but was seriously wounded by a grenade.

25:01There were four young men who were not able to hide. under bodies. They were all wounded, and they were taken outside and put on a pickup truck and driven into Gaza. And that footage we saw for the first time when we talked with you. We spoke on October 16th, I've been seeing you and John. Our son, by all accounts of the witnesses, had his left arm blown off. When John said that, I realized I'd seen their son being kidnapped. Four days earlier at the At the Nova festival site, Israeli soldiers showed me this gruesome video recovered from a terrorist cell phone. That's Hirsch with the bones sticking out of his left forearm being forced into a pickup truck.

25:47As soon as we got off, I said, I need to call you. But I still found...

25:56To this day, I am sorry that that is how you found out that I was the one to tell you that that there's this video. But we were so thankful. And it made us know that he was taken alive, that he walked on his own two feet. And we also were really grateful that you did it in such a human way. In this sideways world, when we had the proof that he was kidnapped, that was actually good. The time is running out to save them. The time is running out to save all of us. Rachel became for many the face of the hostage crisis, meeting the Pope, world leaders, and giving hundreds of interviews. We want to save Hirsch's life.

26:45We want to save all of those hostages. Every day she wore a piece of tape. On it she'd written the number of days since Hirsch and the other 250 hostages were taken. I was always saying, I love you, stay strong, survive. I love you, stay strong, survive. I love you, stay strong, survive. Was it a command to you as well? Yes, because there were times when I would just get seized with emotional and psychological and physical pain, and I would keel over onto John, and I would just say, how much longer? How much longer? How much longer? On the 201st day, Hamas posted this video of Hirsch. And we see the stump of his arm.

27:32It was a propaganda video. Yes. And that gave us another bolt of adrenaline. Keep going, keep going. This child needs you. Hirsch!