President Donald Trump warned Iran the United States will hit it “very hard” after revealing new activity at the Islamic Republic’s deeply fortified Pickaxe Mountain nuclear site. The public cautioning marks a shift from July when he said Washington was closely watching the underground complex but saw “no activity” there.
“We notice there’s a little activity at Pickaxe,” Trump said Wednesday night at the Republican National Convention in Texas. “I would advise Iran not to get cute, because we will have to hit them very hard.”
The warning comes less than a week after Trump said the United States could strike Pickaxe “very soon” if Iran attempted to use the site to rebuild a nuclear program devastated by U.S. and Israeli attacks.
“We know everybody that’s moving at Pickaxe. We know everybody that’s moving everywhere all over Iran,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last Friday. “And if anything goes bad, we hit them. We hit them hard.”
The latest warning, however, is the first time Trump has publicly said the United States is now detecting activity at the facility.
The president had drawn the opposite distinction in July while threatening to destroy Pickaxe, saying U.S. surveillance was closely monitoring the site but had not detected activity there.
“We’re watching Pickaxe Mountain very closely. We don’t see any activity there,” Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt at the time, before adding: “We’re going to take out Pickaxe Mountain. Tell the Iranians to be ready.”
Trump’s new assessment comes as International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi separately confirmed Thursday that the United Nations nuclear watchdog has observed indications of movement around the site.
“There are some indications that there is movement around this construction site,” Grossi told Bloomberg TV.
“We don’t have any concrete information as to activities that may be taking place there,” he cautioned.
The IAEA has never inspected the heavily fortified tunnel complex and is relying on remote imagery to monitor the facility, leaving the agency unable to determine whether the movement is connected to nuclear activity.
Grossi said Iran began developing the complex after a 2020 attack badly damaged a centrifuge assembly facility at the nearby Natanz nuclear complex.
“They said at the time, ‘We are going to put everything in tunnels, inside a mountain,’” Grossi recalled. “This was going to be impermeable and protected from attacks.”
The new observations follow a six-year satellite imagery analysis released Wednesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which found a “clear surge in construction activity” at Pickaxe this year and more road activity than at any other point in the site’s history.
The Washington-based think tank found that work at the facility has shifted from active excavation toward probable internal construction and continued reinforcement, including the hardening of tunnel entrances, paving of its internal road network, reinforcement around access points, and removal of excavated material.
CSIS nevertheless cautioned that the continuing construction, lack of heightened internal security, and absence of nonconstruction vehicles and equipment suggest the underground facility “is not yet capable of enrichment work, if that is the intended purpose.”
The group said satellite imagery alone could neither confirm nor refute previous Israeli intelligence reports that Iran had moved centrifuges or centrifuge components into Pickaxe.
The distinction is significant as U.S. and Israeli intelligence assess what remains of an Iranian nuclear program that suffered devastating damage during successive military campaigns.
The Jerusalem Post reported this week, citing multiple sources familiar with Israel’s intelligence assessments, that Iran currently has no centrifuges enriching uranium, the vast majority of its roughly 20,000 centrifuges were destroyed or rendered unusable, and most of its nuclear facilities remain out of operation.
The outlet reported, however, that a significant number of centrifuges survived deep underground, including potentially hundreds of advanced IR-6 centrifuges that could eventually be salvaged and reconnected.
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Iran’s stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 and 20 percent also remains difficult to access beneath rubble and underground, according to the report, although Israeli officials remain concerned Tehran could eventually attempt to recover portions of it clandestinely.
Israeli intelligence currently views Pickaxe as a strategic future threat but still assesses that the facility is not operational, the Post reported. Both the Mossad and IDF intelligence would prefer to eliminate or disable the site before Iran can make it operational and move enough equipment inside to begin enriching uranium.
The site, roughly two kilometers south of Natanz, is carved deep into a granite mountain and could be significantly more difficult to destroy than Fordow, the underground enrichment facility struck by the United States last year.
CSIS estimates Pickaxe may be 80 to 100 meters underground, although it cautions that its precise depth cannot be determined from satellite imagery.
Analysts say the complex could ultimately serve as a centrifuge assembly facility, an enrichment plant, or a protected location for other nuclear weapons-relevant work, including uranium metallurgy and chemical conversion.
The Pentagon has already developed operational plans for a potential strike on Pickaxe, according to CNN, which reported Wednesday that the facility was included in a target package considered earlier this summer.
The report said the U.S. military has also been examining how to attack facilities buried beyond the effective reach of its existing bunker-busting weapons, including work connected to a subterranean test site carved into granite at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
The challenge is greater at Pickaxe because the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator — the 30,000-pound bunker-busting weapon used against Fordow — may not be capable of penetrating deeply enough to destroy the complex.
Israeli officials have recently expressed greater confidence that allied air forces could at least disable Pickaxe even if they could not completely destroy it, according to the Post.
The renewed focus on Iran’s underground facilities comes as Tehran is already attempting to regenerate another strategic capability badly damaged earlier in the war.
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Iran has resumed assembling ballistic missiles from stockpiled components at underground facilities and is attempting to establish additional subterranean assembly sites to make them harder to strike, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday, citing U.S. and Middle Eastern officials.
Intelligence has detected activity at several such sites, including the Khojir missile complex southeast of Tehran, according to the Journal.
Production remains substantially below Iran’s prewar capacity after U.S. and Israeli attacks destroyed industrial facilities needed to manufacture missiles and their components, while the U.S. naval blockade has made it more difficult for Tehran to import materials needed for solid-fuel missiles.
The Pentagon has said the campaign destroyed up to 90 percent of Iran’s drone, ballistic missile, and naval industrial base.
The missile rebuilding does not establish that Iran is similarly reconstituting its nuclear program at Pickaxe, but it underscores the challenge facing Washington and Jerusalem as they seek to prevent Tehran from restoring military capabilities destroyed during the war.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that Iran was attempting to rebuild its nuclear capability and vowed further Israeli action.
“After we destroyed its immediate capability to produce nuclear bombs — in both Operation Rising Lion and Operation Roaring Lion — it is trying again,” Netanyahu said.
“We are striking the Iranian axis,” he added. “More to come.”
Trump, meanwhile, defended his decision to attack Iran’s nuclear program in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Thursday night, saying he would make the same decision again.
“I don’t believe in the word regret,” Trump said. “You can always question yourself a little bit, and a few people have asked me that. If I had to do it again, I’d do exactly as I did. I took out their nuclear capability.”
Trump said allowing Tehran to obtain a nuclear weapon would have posed an unacceptable threat to Israel, the Middle East, and the United States.
“They would have wiped out Israel. They would have wiped out the Middle East. And they would have started hitting a couple of our cities,” he said.
“They’re not going to have a nuclear weapon.”
That pledge has increasingly focused attention on what remains of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure after the destruction of its principal enrichment and processing sites — and particularly on Pickaxe, one of the most deeply buried facilities left untouched.
Trump has now moved from saying the United States was watching the mountain but saw no activity, to threatening a strike “very soon,” to saying Washington has begun detecting movement there.
His warning to Tehran this week was correspondingly direct.
“I would advise Iran not to get cute,” Trump said, “because we will have to hit them very hard.”
Joshua Klein is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.
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