President Donald Trump said the United States is closely monitoring Iran's secretive underground nuclear facility known as Pickaxe Mountain and warned that even limited activity there would trigger an immediate American response.
Speaking to Fox News, Trump said satellite surveillance had detected only minimal activity at the site so far but that the U.S. would strike hard if that changed. He described the level of surveillance capability trained on the facility as extraordinarily precise, down to identifying individuals and their identification badges from space.
Pickaxe Mountain, known in Farsi as Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, sits roughly 1.5 kilometers south of the Natanz enrichment complex in Isfahan province and is believed to be one of the most heavily fortified nuclear-linked sites in Iran. According to a satellite imagery analysis published by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, the tunnel complex is buried beneath hundreds of meters of granite and has been under construction since around 2020. Iran maintains the facility is intended for assembling centrifuges, though international inspectors have never been granted access to verify that claim. Experts cited by the institute say the site may be too deep even for the United States' most powerful bunker-busting bombs to fully destroy.
Trump's warning comes amid a renewed escalation between the U.S. and Iran, with American forces having carried out strikes on Iranian targets for a third consecutive night as tensions mount around the Strait of Hormuz. A ceasefire reached in April has been tested repeatedly in recent weeks.
The threat drew a sharp response from Tehran. Mehdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser to Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said in comments carried by Fars News that any strike on Pickaxe Mountain would turn the region into hell. Mohammadi described the facility as the most fortified nuclear site in the world and argued that an American attack would be doomed to fail, saying it would show Washington had exhausted its military options.
The exchange marks the latest escalation in rhetoric around a site that has taken on outsized significance in the standoff. Unlike Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan, all of which sustained heavy damage during the war that began in February, Pickaxe Mountain has never been struck, and its exact purpose remains one of the most closely guarded questions in Iran's nuclear file.
