Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, has suggested that Donald Trump could be only days away from ordering a nuclear attack on Iran aimed at destroying the underground Pickaxe Mountain facility.
The conservative commentator warned that any strike on the site could make World War Three “inevitable.”
Carlson claimed Trump was facing pressure from Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he described as “cornered and desperate” after losing his majority in the Israeli election.
“Netanyahu has been pushing hard for one,” Carlson said.
Neither the United States nor Israel has officially confirmed that such an attack is being planned.
The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Mail’s request for comment.
Carlson offered no documentary evidence for the claim, instead referring to an unnamed “informed observer.”
“Bibi calls Trump about it every day,” Carlson quoted the anonymous source as saying.
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has claimed Donald Trump could be days away from ordering a nuclear strike on Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain facility
US President Donald Trump speaks at a midterm campaign rally at Five Flags Center in Dubuque, Iowa, on November 1
The claim followed remarks by Trump, who threatened Iran with “the hammer” during a campaign rally in Iowa on Sunday.
“And the only reason why I’m not finished with Iran is I want to be nice. I want to try and save all those lives if I can… But at some point we’re going to have to give them the hammer,” Trump told supporters.
Trump made the comments after speaking with Netanyahu on Saturday about whether, and when, military operations against Tehran should be intensified.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Carlson told his 17.9 million followers: “After the first nuclear strike, World War Three is inevitable. That war would be short and final.”
The post has reportedly been viewed 28.1 million times.
Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, commonly known as Pickaxe Mountain, sits south of Iran’s Natanz uranium-enrichment complex. The Natanz site was bombed by the United States during Operation Midnight Hammer, carried out during the 12-day Iran-Israel war in 2025.
The mountain facility is among the few Iranian sites associated with the country’s nuclear programme that have not been hit by US or Israeli forces.
Unverified reports have alleged that part of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium could be stored there. That material could potentially be enriched further for use in nuclear weapons.
A satellite image shows the Natanz nuclear facility and Pickaxe Mountain near Natanz, Iran, on June 30
Construction of the facility began in 2020, according to the ISIS think tank
Recent satellite images appear to show construction work taking place at the site.
Construction of the facility began in 2020, according to the ISIS thinktank, after what Iranian authorities reported at the time as an explosion caused by an act of sabotage at the Natanz site.
Tehran claimed at the time the Natanz sabotage had caused significant damage, and in September of that year, the country’s then nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, said the regime had started constructing a ‘modern, larger and more comprehensive hall in all dimensions in the heart of the mountain near Natanz’ for making advanced centrifuges.
Centrifuges, tube-shaped devices arranged in large cascades of dozens of machines, rapidly spin uranium gas to enrich it.
Experts agree that the size of the project indicates Iran will likely be able to use the underground facility to enrich uranium as well as to build centrifuges, which produce nuclear fuel.
Additional cascades spinning would allow Tehran to quickly enrich uranium under the mountain’s protection.
Protected by anti-aircraft batteries, fencing and Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, the facility sprawls across 2.7 square kilometres (1 square mile) in the country’s arid Central Plateau. It has multiple entrances visible from satellite images.
In 2023, an Associated Press story on Pickaxe Mountain included analysis from experts at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies that suggested Iran is likely building a facility at a depth of between 80 metres (260 feet) and 100 metres (328 feet).
Digging has continued at the site in the time since, with some experts suggesting it could be even deeper underground.
Such underground facilities led the US to create the GBU-57 bomb, which can plow through at least 60 metres (200 feet) of earth before detonating, according to the American military.
‘An attack on Pickaxe Mountain could target the above-ground incoming power supply lines, the location of ventilation shafts [the targets in the attacks in June last year] and the open tunnel entrances,’ the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security said.
Satellite imagery suggests the site features two pairs of entrances and a security wall that was recently completed.
Since the US and Israel began launching strikes, a pair of eastern tunnel portal entrances has been hardened and partially backfilled to prevent ground vehicle access, but they have not been sealed completely, according to the ISIS thinktank.
Sam Lair, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told Reuters that increasing the strength of the tunnel entrances would complicate ‘targeting with penetrating munitions like bunker busters’.
‘We’ll be hitting that area pretty soon, and very heavily,’ Trump told reporters on July 21.
On July 28 he repeated the threat: ‘I know exactly what’s going on at Pickaxe. It’s not a big problem – we took out their nuclear sites, and we’ll have to take out Pickaxe if we don’t make a deal.’
Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Esmail Baghaei has previously said that ‘no nuclear activity is taking place’ at Pickaxe Mountain.
He described US threats as ‘a fabricated pretext for aggression, destruction, and sabotage’.
In the final days of a US midterm election campaign, driven by voter frustration over high energy and commodity prices stemming from the conflict, Trump and Netanyahu are threatening to bomb Iran again.
‘I have a decision to make,’ the US president said on Fox News this week. ‘Do I finish it off, which would be very easy to do, or do I make a deal?’
In October, he threatened to deploy the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal, known as the massive ordnance air blast bomb – or the ‘mother of all bombs’ – against the secretive facility.
But the MOAB, weighing 21,000 pounds, is simply too big to fit on traditional bombers, and would have to be dropped from the hold of a slow-moving C-130 cargo plane, which would be risky to fly deep into Iran.
America has used a different weapon – the massive ordnance penetrator, or MOP – in previous attacks on the underground nuclear facilities of Natanz and Fordow due to its ability to tunnel through rock and concrete shelters.