Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) cautioned on Tuesday that bombing Iran’s underground Fordow nuclear facility would leave significant enriched uranium buried underground.

“I’m a little confused on all the conversation about dropping a bunker buster on a mountain that’s filled with enriched uranium, and how that solves the problem. If you’re going to try to get enriched uranium out of the country, dropping a big bunker buster on it may disable the centrifuges in [Fordow], but you still have 900 pounds of enriched uranium sitting there,” Lankford told Jewish Insider. “And so to me, the most strategic thing we can do is find a way to get that enriched uranium out of there and also take out their capacity to do any more enrichment.”

He added that such an operation could be “[with Iran’s] consent [through a deal] or kinetic [military operations], one or the other.” Most experts believe that Israel lacks the ability to destroy the Fordow facility without U.S. assistance.

“They can’t have that level of enriched uranium sitting there in those centrifuges, all spinning, but just burying that uranium inside the mountain, I think, doesn’t solve the problem either,” Lankford continued.

Andrea Stricker, the deputy director of the nonproliferation and biodefense program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said that the risk from nuclear materials remaining at Fordow after an Israeli or American strike would be minimal.

“If the Israelis target Fordow they would likely render it, for all practical purposes, inaccessible. The highly enriched uranium stocks could survive but would be very difficult for the Iranians to reach,” Stricker told JI. “The United States using the 30,000-pound massive ordnance penetrators would effectively destroy the material or entomb it inside. “

She added that there is “little concern about a major radiological incident in either case. Any radiation and chemical hazard would be minimal and localized to the facility, requiring people to wear protective gear.”

She compared the possibility to the Israeli strikes on above-ground facilities at Natanz, where the International Atomic Energy Agency reported no significant concerns about radiological contamination outside the site.

Asked about whether the U.S. should be pushing for regime change in Iran, Lankford said that “the best thing that could happen is regime change there,” but did not endorse the idea of using U.S. forces to achieve that goal. President Donald Trump suggested on Tuesday that the U.S. could kill Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah, Ali Khamenei.

“This is a regime that chants, over and over, ‘Death to America. Death to Jews.’ And they’ve actively worked towards assassinating President Trump, assassinating former members of our cabinet, working for the undermining of the United States government, attacking our warships through the Houthis off the coast of Yemen,” the Oklahoma Republican said. “We need to see regime change there because I’m not sure things get better for the Iranian people, or for the region, until there’s new leadership with a very different vision.”

He said that while the nuclear threat is the most pressing issue, it’s hard to see how the situation will improve, how the Iranian government can ever be trusted or how the Iranian people could have better lives under the Islamic Republic regime.

Lankford said that, under war powers limitations, the U.S. military may not be able to get involved until it is attacked directly or until the administration can provide evidence that Iran is planning a direct attack on the United States or U.S. personnel, as it did for the 2020 killing of Quds Force Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

The Oklahoma senator said in a CNN interview that the U.S. should not “rush into a war” but added that “when we are attacked, when we are threatened, we can’t just sit back and pretend that’s not going to happen.”

“If 9/11 taught us anything, when people chant ‘Death to America’ thousands of miles away, that does have consequences, they can carry that out,” Lankford continued

He noted on CNN that there are also 700,000 Americans in Israel, and that what happens in the region will impact them. Lankford also said Iran is “dancing on a threshold there seeing how close they can get to attacking Americans without our response.”

Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill, Lankford expressed support for the continued provision of U.S. aid to Israel to defend itself and carry on its military operations, and criticized colleagues who he said had not argued that additional congressional authorization was needed in order to provide U.S. support for Ukraine but are now taking a different approach to Israel.

“There seems to be a double standard among some of my colleagues that they strongly defend the rights of Ukraine to defend themselves, but hesitate on Israel,” Lankford said.

Iran’s underground Fordow nuclear site is a key target in the current operation against the Islamic Republic, Israel’s national security advisor, Tzachi Hanegbi, said on Tuesday.

“This operation will not conclude without a strike on the Fordow nuclear facility,” Hanegbi told Israel’s Channel 12 News.

The Fordow facility is home to thousands of centrifuges, crucial to Iran’s weapons-grade uranium enrichment program, and is located 295 feet underground beneath a mountain. Israel is thought to have neither the munitions nor the aircraft to destroy it from the air, while the U.S. does. 

Washington, however, has yet to make clear if it will take part in the offensive on Iran, though it has shot down Iranian missiles headed for Israel in the last few days. Hanegbi said that he does not believe the Trump administration has made a decision on the matter yet.

Hanegbi denied that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had asked the U.S. to join Israel in bombing Iranian nuclear sites: “We didn’t ask and we won’t ask. We will leave it to the Americans to make such dramatic decisions about their own security. We think only they can decide.”

“We are very careful and the prime minister is very careful not to ask for anything the Americans do not think is in their interest,” he said. 

When the IDF presented its plan to the Israeli Security Cabinet a year ago, Hanegbi said, it was for the operation against Iran to be carried out by Israel alone. He called the plan “totally blue and white.”

However, Israel did ask the U.S. for help with its defense, because it has the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) system, he said.

Hanegbi said that the U.S. is not only committed to protecting Israeli lives, but to the hundreds of thousands of American citizens living in Israel.

As to reports that President Donald Trump rejected an Israeli plan to kill Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Hanegbi said they are “fake from the land of fake.”

“We don’t ask for permission from the U.S., and the U.S. doesn’t expect us to share [our plans] with them,” Hanegbi said.

Regime change is not Israel’s goal, the national security advisor said.

“I think every sane person, not only in Israel, would be happy to see this loathsome, murderous, cruel regime fall and be replaced by peace-loving people. Can we set that as a goal for ourselves? No,” Hanegbi said. 

While Hanegbi acknowledged that “the best way to remove the nuclear threat is for there to be a regime that does not want a nuclear weapon,” he said “that is not something we can attain kinetically right now.”

In addition, Hanegbi said the mullahs’ regime could fall as a result of “the process in which Iran lost its grip on the Shiite axis that was crazed in wanting to harm Israel,” but added that “it is not reasonable to think it will happen in the coming days.”

Hanegbi also expressed doubts that Iran would negotiate its surrender soon and said Israel did not receive any messages that Iran wants to hold talks to end the war.

“The Iranians are a proud people,” he said. “I don’t think they will wave the white flag at the beginning of the campaign.”

As such, he added, “we will continue with our plan. It will take time. We have many varied targets.”

Hanegbi said that Iranian gas fields and its energy sector “do not have immunity,” and that Israel struck an oil refinery used by the military within the last day.

Iran has “a strategic goal to strike our energy facilities,” he said. “They want to cause chaos in Israel. When they hit refineries in Haifa, they know what they’re doing.”