Trump says U.S. will bomb Pickaxe Mountain, a suspected hub of Iranian nuclear activity

After the United States attacked Iran’s largest nuclear facilities last year, both President Trump and the White House were adamant that the Middle Eastern country’s nuclear program had been destroyed.

“As seen in satellite images, massive damage has been done to all Nuclear facilities in Iran. Destruction is the right term!” Trump wrote on social media.

“Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Have Been Destroyed – Suggestions Otherwise Are Fake News,” the White House wrote in a press release.

A year later, the United States and Iran have been five months into a war that Trump said would end within weeks. Iran has gained leverage by seizing control of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital energy corridor, and the United States has been forced to the negotiating table as global gas prices soar, including after a ceasefire agreement collapsed this week.

And Trump – facing mounting criticism that he is pushing the US into another “endless war” despite his campaign to do just the opposite – is turning his back on the idea that Iran poses an unacceptable nuclear threat and that another Iranian nuclear facility, known as Mount Kazma, should be attacked.

“The pickaxe is a possible target for a nice, big shot right by the front door,” the president said recently on “The Hugh Hewitt Show.” “We will destroy Mount Kazma. Tell the Iranians to be ready.”

Kazma, a deeply fortified facility that is difficult to penetrate even with powerful “bunker buster” bombs, was not targeted during the 12-Day War between Iran, the United States and Israel last year or in the full-scale war over the past five months.

But it is less than three kilometers from Natanz, one of Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, which was hit both last year and this year. on monday, The Wall Street Journal reported Israeli intelligence believes Iran moved thousands of uranium enrichment centrifuges to Kazma last fall; this strengthens its ability to reestablish a nuclear program that threatens the United States and its regional allies.

Trump’s sudden focus on Kazma as a suspected center of Iran’s nuclear activity, which comes as he seeks to justify his administration’s continued involvement in the unpopular war there, is an acknowledgment that his administration’s two previous military actions and years of diplomacy attempts have failed to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Few experts believed the Trump administration’s claims that Iran’s nuclear program had been completely destroyed, and even Trump and his closest allies pushed back on some of those comments, including discussions about Iran’s ability to retrieve and reuse enriched material buried at Natanz and other targeted sites.

Some experts cited construction activity around Kazma as evidence that Iran is continuing to develop the facility in violation of recent agreements with the United States, but said the exact nature of the work was unknown. They also wondered whether the Trump administration was considering using the work there to set the stage for broader, on-the-ground war efforts that are unpopular in the United States but are necessary to truly achieve Trump’s goal of completely ending Iran’s nuclear program.

The Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington think tank, said last week that it was not clear “whether Iran still plans to build a large-scale assembly plant at Pickaxe Mountain, given the destruction of Iran’s centrifuge program,” but that “if Iran begins rebuilding its centrifuge production capacity, it may plan to build a smaller centrifuge assembly plant at Pickaxe Mountain that could serve its nuclear weapons program.”

The institute said the area beneath the mountain “may also be large enough to accommodate a centrifuge enrichment facility capable of producing weapons-grade uranium” and “possibly large enough to accommodate certain nuclear weaponization activities, such as making weapons-grade uranium metal and converting it into nuclear weapons components.”

Retired Army Gen. Joseph Votel, former head of U.S. Central Command, told The Times that Iran has had a significant amount of time to relocate equipment since last year’s bombings and “showed that they are knowledgeable about such matters” and that the United States “needs to be serious about this and try to verify the intelligence.”

And “if there are centrifuges that move there and operate underground and spin and develop nuclear bomb-grade materials,” he said, “we should be very, very concerned about that.”

Benjamin Radd, a political scientist and senior fellow at the UCLA Burkle Center for International Affairs, said it is true that Iran continues its enrichment program through covert means and poses an ongoing threat, and that “the war is not going the way the president wants.” He also said Iran’s activity around Kazma helped Trump justify the war and its possible expansion.

Radd said Iran used the war to prevent independent inspections of its nuclear facilities by the International Atomic Energy Agency and rebuilt some of its nuclear capabilities in the process, including shifting talks with the United States from its nuclear program to the Strait of Hormuz.

Meanwhile, Trump and the United States have been “idle” between trying to “manage” Iran’s nuclear program by reining in its enrichment and trying to “neutralize” the program with targeted attacks on its nuclear infrastructure. Radd said Trump “does not have the determination, ability or authority” to take action to completely dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, “even though his rhetoric is spot on,” because that would require a “much stronger intervention” than the American public is willing to accept, such as U.S. troops on the ground in Iran.

He said he wondered whether the president’s talk about Kazma was part of a shift in that direction, or at least threatened it, after Trump and his advisers realized that the current cycle of war, negotiations and then more war had given Iran the time it needed to restructure its nuclear program.

“I wonder if this is just a threat or if it’s a real option that the president is actually considering,” Radd said.

Under questioning in the Senate on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to say whether American bombs could destroy everything below Mount Ida.