{"id":278696,"date":"2026-09-05T02:50:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-05T02:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/278696\/"},"modified":"2026-09-05T02:50:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-05T02:50:14","slug":"donald-trump-issues-fresh-threat-to-strike-irans-pickaxe-mountain-nuclear-site","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/278696\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump Issues Fresh Threat To Strike Iran&#8217;s Pickaxe Mountain Nuclear Site"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>US President Donald Trump on Friday said the United States could &#8220;hit&#8221; Iran&#8217;s heavily fortified underground nuclear site known as <a class=\"sp_lnk2\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ndtv.com\/world-news\/pickaxe-mountain-site-near-natanz-facility-may-be-hiding-irans-uranium-8766815\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Pickaxe Mountain <\/a>&#8220;very soon&#8221;, days after Washington targeted Iranian military targets.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking to reporters at the Oval Office, Trump defended the months-long US military campaign against the Islamic Republic, saying its primary objective was to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re in five months now. And you know what we did in five months? They&#8217;re not going to have a nuclear weapon; that&#8217;s what we did,&#8221; Trump said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Iran will not have a nuclear weapon because if they did, you probably wouldn&#8217;t be standing here very long,&#8221; he added.<br \/>Trump then warned that <a class=\"sp_lnk2\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ndtv.com\/search?searchtext=Pickaxe-Mountain\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Pickaxe Mountain<\/a> could be targeted if the US detects activity there.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We may hit Pickaxe very soon because if there was anything going on with Pickaxe,&#8221; Trump said, adding that US intelligence was closely monitoring activity at the site.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We know everybody that&#8217;s moving at Pickaxe; we know everybody that&#8217;s moving everywhere all over Iran. And if anything goes bad, we hit them; we hit them hard,&#8221; Trump said.<\/p>\n<p>Pickaxe Mountain is located near Iran&#8217;s heavily damaged Natanz uranium-enrichment facility and is described as a heavily fortified underground complex containing two deeply buried tunnel systems.<\/p>\n<p>The Wall Street Journal had earlier reported that Israeli intelligence believes Iran has relocated thousands of centrifuges to the deeply buried facility.<\/p>\n<p>The underground construction of the site is believed to make it substantially more resistant to conventional aerial bombardment, making any potential US decision to strike it a significant escalation in the campaign against Iran&#8217;s nuclear infrastructure.<\/p>\n<p>Trump also argued that US military intervention had prevented a wider regional conflict, saying that without American action, Israel and the broader Middle East would have faced a potentially more serious threat.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;If we didn&#8217;t go in there, you wouldn&#8217;t have Israel right now, you wouldn&#8217;t have the Middle East, and they probably would go at European cities and our cities next,&#8221; Trump said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;But we stopped them from having a nuclear weapon in five months,&#8221; he added.<\/p>\n<p>The remarks came days after the US Central Command said American forces had completed a wave of strikes against Iranian military targets.<\/p>\n<p>According to CENTCOM, the operations targeted facilities associated with Iran&#8217;s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps last week, including air-defence installations, radar systems, maritime assets, mine-laying capabilities and communications sites.<\/p>\n<p>CENTCOM said the strikes followed what it described as recent &#8220;attempted attacks&#8221; by the IRGC against commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and against US service members.<\/p>\n<p>Trump also spoke about the recent US strikes on Iranian radar systems, claiming American forces had destroyed sophisticated radar installations on two occasions.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;There had been no shooting for days before the hit that we gave them the other night to wipe out the radar they had,&#8221; Trump said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;They had very sophisticated radar \u2013 they brought in radar because we knocked it out once, and now we knocked it out twice. Now we don&#8217;t notice any activity,&#8221; he added.<\/p>\n<p>Trump suggested Iran had become reluctant to continue deploying radar systems because of repeated US attacks.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think they&#8217;re tired of putting it in and getting blown up,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>Iran had strongly condemned the latest American strikes, accusing Washington of violating Iranian sovereignty and targeting non-military infrastructure and civilian sites across several provinces.<\/p>\n<p>Iran&#8217;s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Iranian armed forces had responded with what it described as &#8220;crushing defensive strikes&#8221; against US military bases in West Asia that Tehran said served as the origin, support and staging points for American attacks.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US President Donald Trump on Friday said the United States could &#8220;hit&#8221; Iran&#8217;s heavily fortified underground nuclear site&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[38,34,75984,75983,196,8290,224,18658],"class_list":["post-278696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-iran","tag-donald-trump","tag-iran","tag-iran-nuclear-site","tag-iran-pickaxe-mountain-nuclear-site","tag-iran-war","tag-strait-of-hormuz-attacks","tag-us-iran-war","tag-us-military-strikes"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/117216164069806738","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278696","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=278696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}