President Trump has spent recent weeks making one thing unmistakably clear: Iran’s underground nuclear facility at Pickaxe Mountain — known in Persian as Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La — is squarely in America’s crosshairs, and no amount of buried concrete is going to change that. “We’re going to take out Pickaxe Mountain. Tell the Iranians to be ready,” the President said earlier this month, one of several public threats aimed at a site that has become the central unresolved problem of the Iran nuclear standoff.
The facility sits roughly a mile from Iran’s Natanz enrichment site, which the U.S. struck along with Fordow and Isfahan during 2025’s Operation Midnight Hammer. Pickaxe Mountain, buried an estimated 328 feet beneath a mountain rising more than 5,000 feet above sea level, was untouched in that operation and has remained so through the current round of fighting, which reignited in February and resumed again in early July after a brief ceasefire collapsed. According to satellite imagery reviewed by independent nonproliferation analysts, construction and reinforcement at the site have only accelerated since Midnight Hammer — dump trucks, tunnel work, and freshly leveled rock at the entrances all suggest Tehran is racing to harden a facility it hopes can outlast anything short of a direct assault.
Why Bombs Alone May Not Be Enough
Even America’s most powerful conventional weapon, the 30,000-pound GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator dropped from B-2 stealth bombers, is rated to penetrate roughly 200 feet of earth — short of what analysts believe would be needed to guarantee destruction of Pickaxe Mountain’s deepest chambers. That gap is exactly why military planners are reportedly weighing options beyond another round of aerial strikes, including the use of elite U.S. Special Operations forces to physically reach the site and secure or destroy any enriched material and centrifuge equipment before it can be moved or hidden further.
Former CIA station chief Dan Hoffman, a national security contributor to several networks, has emphasized that any decision of this magnitude starts with hard intelligence rather than guesswork. Any operation would depend on precise human and satellite intelligence pinpointing exactly where inside the mountain Iran’s remaining centrifuges, enriched uranium, and nuclear personnel are actually located — the kind of granular targeting picture that determines whether a strike neutralizes the threat or simply drives it deeper underground.
A Regime in Transition, Still on the Attack
The stakes are compounded by an Iranian leadership that looks nothing like the one Washington negotiated with a decade ago. After Iran’s previous supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed in strikes earlier this year, Iran’s Assembly of Experts elevated his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, to the position in March — a hardline cleric with deep ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and, according to Iran analysts, none of his father’s occasional public hesitation about nuclear weaponization.
That leadership has continued to project defiance rather than restraint. IRGC-directed missile and drone strikes have repeatedly targeted U.S. and allied installations in the region, including Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, wounding American service members even as U.S. Central Command reports having degraded a large share of Iran’s missile and drone production capacity over the course of the conflict. IRGC commander Ahmad Vahidi remains a central figure directing that proxy pressure campaign across the region.
The Case for Decisive Action
For supporters of the administration’s approach, the throughline is straightforward: Iran’s enrichment of uranium to 60 percent purity was never ambiguous about intent, and a regime now led by a hardliner with fewer internal restraints is not one America can afford to out-wait. As President Trump prepares for high-level consultations with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the administration has signaled that every option — deep-penetration strikes, Special Forces action, or continued economic and military pressure — remains on the table.
Whether Pickaxe Mountain ultimately becomes the site of America’s next major strike or the subject of a negotiated inspection regime, the message from the White House hasn’t changed: the era of Iran quietly reconstituting its nuclear program under a mountain, on Washington’s dime and patience, is over.
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