Nestled beneath the imposing landscape of Pickaxe Mountain, Iran has constructed what seems to be an impregnable nuclear fortress, one that Tehran believes even the United States cannot dismantle. However, President Donald Trump is not willing to let that confidence last another week.
Fortunately, he has several strategies at his disposal.
For years, Tehran has adhered to a familiar approach, clandestinely developing underground nuclear facilities that bolster its ambitions to enhance its nuclear capabilities.
Pickaxe Mountain is emerging as the most recent and possibly the most perilous of these sites.
In 2020, Iran’s head of nuclear operations cautioned that the site was undergoing excavation for the purpose of constructing “a more modern, vaster, and inclusive building,” with operations running round the clock to relocate all critical activities deep within the mountain’s core.
Since then, Iran has spent six years carving Pickaxe into what it hopes will be an indestructible nuclear sanctuary.
This is more than double the time it spent secretly building its enrichment plants at Fordow and Natanz before being caught.
Both those sites were already in “an advanced stage of construction” when inspections occurred.
Inspectors still have never been to Pickaxe, and it appears unlikely they ever will.
Satellite imagery suggests the facility may well be large enough to reconstitute many, possibly all, of Iran’s core nuclear activities: centrifuge storage and production, uranium enrichment and stockpiling and even weaponization.
This is helped by Iran’s technological advances in recent years, which minimize its need for floor space, and time, to dash for a bomb.
A recent report says Iran might now be moving enrichment centrifuges to Pickaxe; it’s been observed working on the site in recent months.
Trump himself warned this year that Iran was undertaking new activities at a site “protected by granite.”
Yet Pickaxe went untouched in Operations Midnight Hammer last year and Epic Fury in the spring.
Iran is banking on the site being impenetrable in a way that its other subterranean sites were not.
Initial estimates suggested it could be even further underground than Fordow, Iran’s most sensitive and deepest-buried enrichment plant at the time it was struck in Midnight Hammer.
Hence Iran’s refusal to negotiate over the site. No new nuclear deal will bring to light, let alone shut down, this key node in the regime’s undimmed nuclear ambitions.
Every month Pickaxe remains intact gives Tehran more time to move equipment, rebuild enrichment capacity and shorten the path back to a nuclear weapon.
The president recognizes the urgency: “That’s where the action is. We’ll be hitting that area pretty soon and very heavily.”
Now he needs to follow through. Targeting it would shatter Tehran’s belief that one mountain can preserve its nuclear ambitions from American airpower.
Midnight Hammer showed that America’s most powerful Massive Ordnance Penetrator bunker busters could severely damage even a deeply buried facility like Fordow.
These weapons relied on smart tactics, precise targeting and fuses that enabled these weapons to drill sequentially through weak points, like ventilation shafts, before detonating to full effect.
That same operation also showed that blocking access to a site can be nearly as effective as burrowing into it.
With Iran’s highly enriched uranium sitting at Isfahan, in storage tunnels potentially beyond reach of bunker busters, salvos of low-flying Tomahawk cruise missiles were used to collapse the entrances and entrap the “nuclear dust” instead.
In the more than a year since these attacks, Iran has poked around but not reentered the site.
Striking Pickaxe could combine elements of what worked best in last summer’s operation, seeking both to maximize direct damage and minimize Iran’s ability to access it afterward.
The site was designed, and construction started, long before Midnight Hammer revealed innovations enabling the MOPs to create and exploit new structural vulnerabilities.
This would entail a mix of bunker busters, cruise missiles and possibly other munitions to attack Pickaxe at multiple points, and from multiple angles.
The facility’s ventilation shafts and tunnel entrances are key. Israeli airstrikes on other Iranian nuclear sites show that disabling their power supplies can add to the effectiveness.
What comes after the strikes would be equally important. Working with Israel and its incredible intelligence capabilities, the United States would need to monitor the site closely and make clear it will conduct follow-on attacks if Iran tries to access it.
Trump has already upended many of Iran’s beliefs about what American presidents will or won’t do.
Now he can confound the expectation that its nuclear program can survive US military action.
Jonathan Ruhe is a fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America.