Why Trump Is Threatening Again to Strike Iran's Pickaxe Mountain, and Why It Matters Now

On Friday, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump said the United States may strike Iran's Pickaxe Mountain "very soon." He added that Washington knows "everybody that's moving at Pickaxe" and across Iran. Within hours, according to the Iranian outlet Khabar Fouri, four US missiles hit an Iranian oil tanker off Kharg Island, the hub that handles about 90 percent of Iran's oil exports.

The threat is not new. In mid-July, Trump told the Hugh Hewitt Show: "We're going to take out Pickaxe Mountain. Tell the Iranians to be ready," and said the US would probably "give Pickaxe a shot relatively soon." It comes more than six months into the war the US and Israel launched on Iran on February 28, and amid mixed messaging from the administration. On Friday Trump called the war "small potatoes." A day earlier Vice President JD Vance had appeared to suggest the conflict had cooled, shrugging off an alleged US strike on a wedding in southern Iran with "sometimes things happen." The source gives no casualty figures for that incident. Earlier in the week Vance said he "wouldn't call it a war" and that there was "no active shooting right now." Yet the two sides have traded attacks this week, including a US strike near Iran's oil infrastructure on Kharg Island.

Pickaxe Mountain, known in Iran as Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, sits in Isfahan province about 220km south of Tehran and only 2km from the Natanz enrichment plant. US intelligence reports indicate it has been excavated beneath hundreds of metres of granite, with the main chambers thought to lie at least 100 metres down, beyond the reach of bunker-penetrating bombs. Some Western analysts speculate it was meant to house an undeclared enrichment plant as a hedge against attacks on known sites. The Institute for Science and International Security, which tracks it by satellite, assesses that it is still under construction and not operational. Iran says its nuclear programme is for power only.

Its significance is that it is intact. The site was spared in the June 2025 US strikes on Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan that ended the 12-day Israel-Iran war, and it has largely escaped the current war; the institute has recorded only the destruction of a vehicle on a nearby spoil pile. With centrifuge manufacturing and enrichment halls elsewhere damaged, analysts see the tunnels as the obvious place to rebuild. The Wall Street Journal reported in July that Israel had given Washington intelligence suggesting thousands of centrifuges were moved inside late last year. The US has not confirmed that. Trump has been less alarmist than Israel, and centrifuges are useless without uranium gas to feed them.

The damage elsewhere is substantial by most estimates. The European Council on Foreign Relations believes the 2025 strikes likely destroyed many of the roughly 18,000 centrifuges then running at Natanz and Fordow, several production sites, and Ardakan, Iran's only yellowcake milling plant. Nearly 4,000 more were installed but idle and may have survived. The IAEA confirmed further damage in March 2026 to the entrance buildings of Natanz's underground plant, with no additional impact on the plant itself. In June the institute reported that tunnel entrances at all three main sites remain sealed and that it saw no evidence of enrichment.

Trump had said the June 2025 strikes "completely and totally obliterated" the sites, but days later a leaked preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency assessment found them significantly damaged, not destroyed, with the programme set back by less than six months. Nader Hashemi of Georgetown University told Al Jazeera that no one really knows the programme's current state. Iran is believed to hold about 440kg of uranium enriched to 60 percent. Making a weapon would require enriching it to 90 percent, which needs centrifuges whose condition is unknown. Before the June 2025 attacks the IAEA verified about 10 tonnes of enriched uranium in total, which IAEA chief Rafael Grossi said in March could, if enriched to 90 percent, yield more than 10 warheads. Iran suspended cooperation after the strikes, so the agency cannot report the stockpile's size, location or composition, though it believes much of the 60-percent material is in tunnels at Isfahan. No inspector has entered the bombed sites.

Iran's Khatam al-Anbiya military headquarters has warned that bombing the mountain would renew war across the region, at a moment when the administration would prefer to keep the conflict contained before the midterm elections. Talks have been in limbo since a 60-day window lapsed in mid-August without a deal. Tehran says it is doing no work at Natanz and calls the focus on Pickaxe Mountain a manufactured pretext for attack.