Donald Trump has said the United States may have to strike Pickaxe Mountain, the fortified underground site linked to Iran’s nuclear programme, while ruling out the use of nuclear weapons and American ground troops.
In a Thursday-night interview with Newsmax at the White House, Trump named the site directly: “Now we’re looking at Pickaxe Mountain. We may have to go there. We’ll take a shot at that one. We’ll knock it out fast.” He added that there was no need for a nuclear bomb: “No, I wouldn’t use nuclear. We don’t have to. We’re the greatest nuclear power in the world.”
A site that has escaped every strike
Pickaxe Mountain, known in Iran as Kuh-e Kolang, is a complex of tunnels buried in a mountain a few miles from the Natanz nuclear site. Iran declared it a centrifuge assembly facility in 2021, and analysts estimate it lies around 100 metres underground. It is widely described as the last significant nuclear-linked site in Iran to have escaped strikes, and Trump has repeatedly threatened to hit it since July. Analysts have cautioned that even the heaviest US bunker-busting bombs may not guarantee its destruction.
Trump also declined to say whether he had authorised the use of the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, known as the “mother of all bombs”, against Iranian energy infrastructure and nuclear sites. He did stress that it is a conventional weapon: “The mother of all bombs is not nuclear. It’s not nuclear at all. This is just an extremely large bomb.” The weapon, developed in 2003, first saw combat in 2017 against an Islamic State tunnel complex in Afghanistan.
Mixed signals before the midterms
The remarks send deliberately mixed signals. Last week Trump said the US would not attack Iran before the November midterm elections and pointed to productive conversations with Tehran; in the same Newsmax interview he predicted the conflict, which began in February with US-Israeli strikes, would end “very soon” because Iran was negotiating. CNN separately reported Thursday that US military planners have drawn up new strike options, while Israel’s security establishment raised its alert level to the highest point in months amid assessments of a possible Iranian attack.
Iran has faced other pressure this month, including reports that Iranian operators were caught using ChatGPT for influence campaigns, and Trump reiterated that Washington’s goal is to make sure Iran never obtains a nuclear weapon, “because if they had it, they would use it, in my opinion, instantaneously.” The threats also arrive as other regional tensions play out in public, such as when Ethiopia told the UN it had no choice but to defend itself.
