What is Pickaxe Mountain?

President Trump’s threats to bomb an underground Iranian nuclear facility called Pickaxe Mountain have brought renewed attention to the heavily fortified nuclear site, as the administration says it’s weighing further military action against the country.

“We’ll be hitting that area very probably pretty soon. And there’s not a thing they can do about it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday.

“You know, normally I wouldn’t say that. If I thought they could do something about it, I would never say that. But we’ll be hitting that area pretty soon, and very heavily,” he continued.

Pickaxe Mountain, known in Iran as Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, is an underground facility located south of Iran’s nuclear enrichment site in Natanz.

According to the Institute for Science and International Security, the underground complex is buried roughly 328 feet beneath the mountain, which rises more than 5,000 feet above sea level.

Iran began excavating the site in 2020 after an above-ground centrifuge facility at Natanz was destroyed in an explosion that same year.

The complex was not hit during the U.S. military’s Operation Midnight Hammer in 2025, during which U.S. forces struck Iran’s main nuclear facilities in Natanz, Fordo and Isfahan. Instead, construction continued and seemingly accelerated in the aftermath of the attack, making Pickaxe Mountain one of the few major underground nuclear sites to have emerged largely intact following the strikes.

While the site is not believed to be operational, satellite imagery assessments made by the Institute for Science and International Security show the underground complex appears large enough to accommodate uranium enrichment and nuclear weapons programs, though there is no evidence Iran is currently working on such pursuits.

When pressed about the facility, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told lawmakers at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Tuesday that the U.S. military has the capabilities to strike deeply buried targets.

“A lot of our capabilities are classified, but if anybody in the world can reach anything on God’s green earth, it’s the United States military, the most powerful military in the world,” Hegseth said. “It’s all about options and trade-offs.”

Israeli intelligence operatives reportedly showed the U.S. evidence that Iran moved uranium-enrichment centrifuges into tunnels deep inside Pickaxe Mountain last year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Israel reportedly passed along the findings to U.S. officials, saying the transfers occurred after Operation Midnight Hammer, which was part of the U.S.-Israeli 12-day war in June 2025 that involved striking three of Iran’s main nuclear sites.

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