Trump threatens strike on Iran's Pickaxe Mountain near Natanz

Dubai,UPDATED: Jul 22, 2026 12:18 IST

US President Donald Trump has threatened to bomb a heavily fortified Iranian nuclear site built inside a mountain near Natanz, as the US and Iran continue to exchange attacks linked to the Strait of Hormuz. The site, known as Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, or Pickaxe Mountain, was not hit during the 2025 US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and work there is still going on.

It is not clear what Iran has placed inside Pickaxe Mountain because the UN nuclear watchdog has never been allowed access. But Trump, speaking to journalists in the Oval Office on Tuesday, said Iran may have moved centrifuges there and suggested the site could soon be targeted. “We’ll be hitting that area ... probably pretty soon. And there’s not a thing they can do about it,” he said.

Pickaxe Mountain is being built next to the Natanz nuclear enrichment site, about 225 km south of Tehran. Natanz, which has both above-ground and underground facilities, has been under international scrutiny for two decades. Repeated sabotage attacks there, including one likely carried out by Israel that destroyed a centrifuge manufacturing site, led Iranian officials to begin work on the new facility.

The site is protected by anti-aircraft systems, fencing and Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, and covers about 2.7 square km in the country’s arid Central Plateau. Satellite images show multiple entrances. In 2023, an Associated Press report, citing experts at the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies, said Iran was likely building the facility at a depth of 80 to 100 metres. Digging has continued since then, and some experts say it could now be even deeper. They also say the scale of construction suggests Iran may use the underground site both to enrich uranium and to build centrifuges.

Centrifuges are tube-shaped machines that spin uranium gas to raise its purity. Larger cascades of these machines would allow Iran to enrich uranium more quickly under the mountain’s protection. The existence of such deep underground sites led the US to develop the GBU-57 bunker-busting bomb, which the American military says can penetrate at least 60 metres of earth before exploding. US officials have reportedly discussed using two of the bombs in succession, though it remains unclear whether that would be enough to damage a facility as deep as Pickaxe Mountain.

Speaking alongside Lebanese President Joseph Aoun on Tuesday, Trump first tried to play down the importance of Pickaxe Mountain by referring to Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium. Before the 2025 strikes, Iran had enriched uranium to nearly weapons-grade purity of 60 per cent. Since then, Iran is not known to have restarted enrichment, and its stockpile is believed to still be at the bombed enrichment sites. “We follow the material, that’s where the action is,” Trump said. He then again raised the possibility of striking Pickaxe Mountain, saying, “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.”

Iran has said areas around its only nuclear power plant at Bushehr have already come under attack during the war, though its Russian-run reactor was not damaged. Tehran also said the US struck the cleared site where it plans to build the Darkhovin nuclear plant, while the Atomic Energy Agency said there was no atomic material there the last time it inspected the location. The United Arab Emirates’ only nuclear power plant, the four-reactor Barakah facility, has also been targeted during the war. Iran has since warned it would take unspecified “required actions” in response to the Darkhovin attack.

In 2025, the US bombed the Iranian nuclear sites at Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz, all of which had carried out uranium enrichment. During the 2025 war and the recent fighting, both Israel and the US said their aim was to stop Iran from ever building a nuclear weapon. Iran has long said its nuclear programme is peaceful, and the IAEA and Western countries do not believe it has had an active military nuclear programme since 2003. However, Iranian officials had increasingly threatened to pursue an atomic bomb even before the recent wars. Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on February 28 in the opening moments of the war, had issued a verbal fatwa calling nuclear weapons un-Islamic, but his son and successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, has not publicly stated his position on the matter. To build a usable weapon, Iran would need to enrich uranium to 90 per cent, then build a bomb, miniaturise it and likely mount it on a ballistic missile — a process that could take months or years and could be detected by Israeli or US intelligence. In short, Pickaxe Mountain has become the latest focus of concern around Iran’s nuclear programme as Trump openly threatens a fresh strike.

With PTI Inputs

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