President Donald Trump has made no secret of the fact that Pickaxe Mountain, an Iranian underground facility, could be a major target should the U.S. military escalate its strikes on the Middle Eastern regime.
“Pickaxe is a possible target for a nice big fat shot right near the front door,” he told radio host Hugh Hewitt last week. “And I think that maybe you’ll see that.”
Trump added that the U.S. is closely monitoring Pickaxe Mountain.
“We see no activity there,” he said. “They’re not doing well with their nuclear situation. Every time we hear about it, we blow it up. So they don’t like talking about it.”
So what exactly is this Iranian site that Trump has suggested targeting?
Located 140 miles south of the Iranian capital of Tehran, Pickaxe Mountain is a massive and heavily fortified storage facility, complete with an underground tunnel system. The site is located near the town of Natanz, and is south of a nuclear complex where two of Iran’s uranium enrichment plants were bombed in strikes on nuclear sites last year.
The Iranian government has said the site is solely intended for producing and assembling advanced centrifuges: machines that rely on uranium enrichment to power nuclear energy.
However, uranium enrichment can also be used for building nuclear weapons.
Iranian officials have also blocked International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors from monitoring activities at Pickaxe Mountain, a decision that has escalated geopolitical tensions.
IAEA inspectors are part of a United Nations agency tasked with ensuring nuclear materials are not used for war purposes. This includes verifying nuclear facilities match site blueprints without discrepancies.
Israeli intelligence said it believes Iran moved thousands of uranium enrichment centrifuges inside Pickaxe Mountain last fall, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal earlier Tuesday.
Trump, however, expressed that he is not yet confident about the report’s claim that Iran has moved nuclear centrifuges into Pickaxe Mountain.
“I think that they, they may have, we don’t have it on record,” Trump told reporters after his meeting with the President of Lebanon on Tuesday. “All we do is read the fake news. The news is so wrong so many times. You know, maybe this one they have right. It doesn’t mean anything unless they have the material. You’re talking about the centrifuges; we follow the material. That’s where the action is.”
Map showing the location of Pickaxe Mountain in Iran. (Graphic by Grace Hagerman/Washington Examiner)
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Map showing the location of Pickaxe Mountain in Iran. (Graphic by Grace Hagerman/Washington Examiner)
Trump also highlighted that Pickaxe Mountain remains a key target in the Iran war: “We’ll be hitting that area very, probably very soon, and there’s not a thing they can do about it.”
Mark Montgomery, who serves as a senior director for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said he doesn’t think Pickaxe Mountain has enough supplies to restart a nuclear program.
“Do I think that things have been moved there? Yes,” he said on LiveNOW from Fox in June last year. “Do I think enough has been moved there to restart an Iranian nuclear program? No. Unless they know how to raise the dead there, they’ve lost way too many scientists to really press forward on this. They’ve lost way too many of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps generals and the Iranian army generals who pushed the program.”
Trump’s threats to attack Pickaxe Mountain come as Iran has killed three additional U.S. soldiers over the weekend, with the number of confirmed U.S. casualties now at 17.
TIMELINE: ALL THE INCIDENTS WHERE US TROOPS HAVE BEEN KILLED DURING THE IRAN WAR
Trump said on Monday that Iran would pay for their deaths.
“Every time Iran kills an American Soldier they will pay for that killing many times over! This directive has been passed on to Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Daniel Caine, and every Leader in the Military,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
