Donald Trump revived a long-running threat in October when he said the US could destroy Pickaxe Mountain quickly, putting the obscure peak back at the center of the fight over Iran’s nuclear program. The warning matters because Pickaxe Mountain is widely believed to conceal a facility deep under the mountain, even though what is inside remains publicly unverified.
Pickaxe Mountain is the English nickname for Kūh-e Kolang Gaz Lā, a 1,600m peak about one mile south of the Natanz nuclear complex in central Iran. Experts believe the mountain hosts a nuclear facility buried between 80m and 100m underground, a depth that would make any strike harder to judge and harder to carry out than an attack on a surface site.
The site drew closer scrutiny after a blast damaged a workshop at Natanz on July 2, 2020, while the workshop was being used to assemble centrifuges. In September 2020, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization said the replacement would be built “in the heart” of Pickaxe Mountain, a remark that tied the peak directly to Iran’s nuclear work and fed outside concern that the underground complex could support activities linked to developing a nuclear weapon.
Since then, the case around Pickaxe Mountain has been built from fragments rather than access. Newspaper reports citing Israeli intelligence assessments say Iran moved centrifuges and related equipment into tunnels there. Satellite photographs have shown continued construction and reinforced entrances, and an assessment in September by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found increased activity at the site during 2026. International inspectors have never been given access.
That gap matters because the site’s contents and layout remain hidden, even as the stakes around it rise. Pickaxe Mountain became a focus after explosions across Iran in 2020 damaged alleged missile sites, power plants and other facilities, though the causes of those blasts remain unclear. The Trump administration’s concern is that the mountain could shelter centrifuges capable of enriching uranium to weapons-grade levels, but the evidence available in public still stops short of confirming exactly what is underground or how close it is to becoming operational.
On November 9, Trump said he wanted to keep the war at status quo and warned that American forces were locked and loaded should circumstances change. For now, that leaves Pickaxe Mountain in an uneasy place: publicly threatened, closely watched, and still not fully known.
