{"id":217212,"date":"2026-07-21T22:18:20","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T22:18:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/217212\/"},"modified":"2026-07-21T22:18:20","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T22:18:20","slug":"trump-says-u-s-will-bomb-pickaxe-mountain-a-suspected-hub-of-iranian-nuclear-activity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/217212\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump says U.S. will bomb Pickaxe Mountain, a suspected hub of Iranian nuclear activity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

After U.S. strikes on Iran\u2019s largest nuclear facilities last year, both President Trump and the White House were adamant that the Middle East nation\u2019s nuclear program had been destroyed.<\/p>\n

\u201cMonumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images. Obliteration is an accurate term!\u201d Trump wrote<\/a> on social media.<\/p>\n

\u201cIran\u2019s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Obliterated \u2014 and Suggestions Otherwise are Fake News,\u201d the White House wrote in a press release<\/a>. <\/p>\n

A year later, the U.S. and Iran are five months into a war Trump said would be over in weeks. Iran has gained leverage by seizing control of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital energy corridor, and the U.S. has been forced to the negotiating table as global gas prices have spiked \u2014 including again this week after a ceasefire agreement collapsed.<\/p>\n

And Trump \u2014 facing mounting criticism that he has pushed the U.S. into another \u201cforever war\u201d<\/a> despite campaigning on doing exactly the opposite \u2014 is leaning back into the notion that Iran presents an unacceptable nuclear threat and strikes are needed, namely at another Iranian nuclear facility known as Pickaxe Mountain.<\/p>\n

\u201cPickaxe is a possible target for a nice big fat shot right near the front door,\u201d the president recently said on \u201cThe Hugh Hewitt Show.\u201d \u201cWe\u2019re going to take out Pickaxe Mountain. Tell the Iranians to be ready.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pickaxe, a heavily fortified facility deep underground that would be difficult to penetrate even with powerful \u201cbunker buster\u201d bombs, was not targeted during last year\u2019s 12 Day War between Iran and the U.S. and Israel, nor in the full-scale war of the last five months.<\/p>\n

However, it is less than two miles from Natanz, one of Iran\u2019s primary nuclear enrichment facilities, which was struck both last year and this year. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported<\/a> that Israeli intelligence believes Iran moved thousands of uranium-enrichment centrifuges into Pickaxe last fall \u2014 bolstering its ability to reconstitute a nuclear program that threatens the U.S. and regional allies.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s sudden focus on Pickaxe as a suspected hub of Iranian nuclear activity, which comes as his administration is trying to justify its continued entanglement<\/a> in its unpopular war there, is an acknowledgment that two prior military campaigns and years of attempted diplomacy by his administration have failed to curb Iran\u2019s nuclear ambitions. <\/p>\n

Few experts ever bought into the Trump administration\u2019s claims that Iran\u2019s nuclear program had been completely destroyed, and even Trump and his closest allies have walked some of those comments back \u2014 including in discussions about Iran\u2019s ability to retrieve and repurpose enriched material buried at Natanz and other targeted sites.<\/p>\n

Some experts have cited construction activity around Pickaxe as evidence Iran is continuing to develop the facility in violation of recent agreements with the U.S., but have said the exact nature of the work isn\u2019t known. They\u2019ve also wondered if the Trump administration intends to use the work there to lay the groundwork for a broader, boots-on-the-ground war effort that would be unpopular in the U.S. but necessary to truly accomplish Trump\u2019s stated goal of ending Iran\u2019s nuclear program for good.<\/p>\n

The Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based think tank, said last week that it wasn\u2019t clear \u201cif Iran still plans on installing a large-scale assembly facility\u201d at Pickaxe Mountain \u201cgiven the destruction of Iran\u2019s centrifuge program,\u201d but \u201cif Iran starts to rebuild its centrifuge manufacturing capability, it could plan to install a smaller centrifuge assembly facility in Pickaxe Mountain able to serve a nuclear weapons program.\u201d<\/p>\n

The space under the mountain, the institute said, may be \u201clarge enough to also hold a centrifuge enrichment plant capable of producing weapon-grade uranium\u201d and is \u201clikely large enough to also hold certain nuclear weaponization activities such as making weapon-grade uranium metal and shaping it into nuclear weapon components.\u201d<\/p>\n

Retired Army Gen. Joseph Votel, the former head of U.S. Central Command, told The Times that Iran has had a substantial amount of time to relocate equipment since the bombings of last year and has \u201cdemonstrated that they are savvy on these kinds of things,\u201d and the U.S. \u201cshould be serious about it and try to confirm the intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

And \u201cif there have been centrifuges that have been moved there and are underground and spinning and developing nuclear bomb grade materials,\u201d he said, \u201cwe should be very, very concerned about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Benjamin Radd, a political scientist and senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Relations, said it is true that Iran is continuing its enrichment program in clandestine ways that present an ongoing threat and that \u201cthe war is not going the way the president wanted.\u201d He also said Iran\u2019s activity around Pickaxe helps Trump justify the war \u2014 and its possible expansion.<\/p>\n

Radd said Iran has used the war to block independent inspections of its nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency and reconstituted some of its nuclear capabilities in the process, including as talks with the U.S. shifted from its nuclear program to the Strait of Hormuz.<\/p>\n

Trump and the U.S., meanwhile, have \u201cvacillated\u201d between trying to \u201cmanage\u201d the Iranian nuclear program by reining in enrichment, to trying to \u201cneutralize\u201d the program with targeted attacks on its nuclear infrastructure. Radd said that \u201ceven though his rhetoric is there,\u201d Trump hasn\u2019t had \u201cthe resolve or the ability or the mandate\u201d to move to fully eliminate Iran\u2019s nuclear program, because that would require \u201cmuch more forceful intervention\u201d than the American public is willing to accept, such as U.S. troops on the ground in Iran.<\/p>\n

He said he wonders now if the president\u2019s talk about Pickaxe is part of a shift in that direction \u2014 or at least threatening it \u2014 after Trump and his advisors realized that the current cycle of war, negotiations and then more war is giving Iran the time it needs to reconstitute its nuclear program.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m wondering if that is just a threat, or if it\u2019s a genuine option that the president is actually considering,\u201d Radd said.<\/p>\n

Under Senate questioning Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declined to say whether American bombs were capable of destroying whatever is under Pickaxe Mountain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After U.S. strikes on Iran\u2019s largest nuclear facilities last year, both President Trump and the White House were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217213,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[5605,10201,62810,62812,34,62811,7090,56566,722,392,683,36,5094,878],"class_list":["post-217212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iran","tag-ability","tag-administration","tag-benjamin-radd","tag-few-expert","tag-iran","tag-iranian-nuclear-activity","tag-nuclear-program","tag-pickaxe-mountain","tag-president-trump","tag-trump","tag-u-s","tag-war","tag-week","tag-year"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116960290580110051","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=217212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217212\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}