Why Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain has become Trump’s next target

“The new site that they’re talking about, they’re trying to possibly reconstitute a site, we’ll hit that site,” Trump told reporters Tuesday during an Oval Office meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun.

“Any site where they’re even thinking about nuclear, we’ll be hitting it very, very powerfully.”

Hours after the US president’s warning, Iran’s joint military command warned that any US attack on Iran’s nuclear or other sensitive sites would widen the regional war, according to state media.

US interests and those of countries supporting Washington would face a “powerful assault” by Iran’s armed forces, Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters said.

Raja News, a hardline Tehran outlet, went further, calling for Iran to publish a list of vital infrastructure across the region, particularly in the United Arab Emirates, and strike the targets if the United States attacks Pickaxe Mountain.

The outlet said Iran should not wait for an attack before responding and urged officials to present a practical plan for withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Trump’s warning followed an Israeli intelligence assessment, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, that Iran moved thousands of uranium-enrichment centrifuges into Pickaxe Mountain last fall.

Israel shared the assessment with Washington, but the allegation has not been independently verified, and neither country has publicly disclosed the evidence supporting it.

If accurate, the reported transfer would make Pickaxe one of the most strategically important surviving sites in Iran’s nuclear program.

Centrifuges enrich uranium by spinning uranium hexafluoride gas at extremely high speeds and are essential for producing nuclear fuel or weapons-grade material.

“When you assemble centrifuges like that, the next step is to put them in an enrichment plant,” David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, told Iran International.

Iran began building Pickaxe Mountain after an explosion in 2020 damaged an above-ground advanced centrifuge assembly facility at Natanz in an attack widely attributed to Israel. Tehran said the underground complex would replace the damaged assembly plant.

Satellite imagery has shown years of continued construction. Albright said the underground complex appears significantly larger than would be required for centrifuge assembly alone, leading his institute to assess that it could eventually also house a uranium-enrichment plant.

If centrifuges are being stored there, experts say the facility could provide Tehran with a pathway to restore uranium enrichment despite months of US and Israeli military strikes.

A difficult target

Its depth also makes Pickaxe one of Iran’s most difficult nuclear facilities to attack.

Andrea Stricker, deputy director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Nonproliferation Program, said the facility is estimated to sit roughly 300 to 450 feet beneath a granite mountain, potentially placing it beyond the reach of conventional US bunker-buster bombs.

“Essentially, Pickaxe is where Iran could reconstitute a nuclear weapons pathway,” Stricker told Iran International.

Rather than attempting to penetrate the mountain itself, experts say military planners could seek to disable the facility by targeting its tunnel entrances, ventilation systems and electrical infrastructure.

“You don’t look to get a bunker buster to pass through the mountain. I mean, that’s just not possible,” Albright said.

But he added that the complex was “not immune from destruction or shutting it down.”

“If they have centrifuges in there and they can’t use them, then that is a step forward to try to keep Iran from building nuclear weapons,” he said.

Stricker said another option would be to destroy access through the eastern and western tunnel entrances, preventing Iran from re-entering the complex while allowing the site to be monitored for renewed activity.

Preventing reconstitution

For Rebeccah Heinrichs, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, Pickaxe represents a different phase of the military campaign.

While Washington still has conventional military targets it can strike from the air, Heinrichs said Pickaxe presents a more complex challenge because of its depth and its potential role in rebuilding Iran’s nuclear program.

If Trump concludes that airpower alone cannot prevent Iran from restoring its nuclear capabilities, Heinrichs said any use of US forces on the ground would more likely involve a limited special-operations mission than a conventional invasion.

"This would be a special operations mission on the ground," she told Eye for Iran, suggesting any such operation would likely be conducted alongside Israel to secure or remove sensitive nuclear material.

There is no public evidence that Washington is planning such an operation.

Heinrichs also suggested that the United States may have deliberately avoided striking Pickaxe so far to preserve the possibility of entering or securing the complex, although Washington has not publicly indicated that this was its reasoning.

Whether Trump ultimately orders an attack remains uncertain, and his warning may be intended partly to deter Iran from activating the facility.

But the president’s remarks, the Israeli intelligence assessment and mounting concern among nuclear experts have placed Pickaxe Mountain at the center of a broader strategic question: how to prevent Iran from rebuilding its nuclear program after months of military strikes.