US President Donald Trump has said the United States may have to strike Pickaxe Mountain, a deeply buried Iranian nuclear site near Natanz, in a Newsmax interview aired Thursday night — while drawing two red lines: no nuclear weapons and no American ground troops in the Iran war.
- Trump said of the fortified site: “We may have to go there. We’ll take a shot at that one. We’ll knock it out fast.”
- He ruled out using nuclear weapons against Iran and said he does not see US ground troops entering the country.
- Pickaxe Mountain — known in Iran as Kuh-e Kolang — is a tunnel complex buried about 100 metres underground near Natanz that Tehran declared a centrifuge assembly site in 2021.
- The remarks came a day after CNN reported the US military has drawn up new strike plans against Iranian energy infrastructure and nuclear sites that could include the GBU-43/B “mother of all bombs.”
- The comments clash with Trump’s line last week that the US would not attack Iran before the November midterm elections.
Asked directly about the site, Trump told Newsmax that Iran’s nuclear programme is “buried under millions of tons of mountain” and named Pickaxe Mountain as the next possible target. “We want to make it so that they will never have a nuclear weapon, because if they had it, they would use it,” he said.
He was equally direct about what he would not do. “No, I wouldn’t use nuclear,” Trump said of a nuclear strike on Iran. “We don’t have to. We’re the greatest nuclear power in the world.” On ground forces, he said: “No, I don’t see that.”
Trump neither confirmed nor denied reports that the Pentagon is weighing the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast — the MOAB, the largest non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal — for strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure and nuclear facilities. He stressed the weapon is not nuclear. “It’s like a tiny nuclear bomb,” he said. “The mother of all bombs is one big bomb, but it’s not nuclear.” The MOAB weighs about 21,600 pounds and was first used in combat in 2017 against an Islamic State tunnel complex in Afghanistan.
Pickaxe Mountain is widely described as the last significant nuclear-linked site in Iran to have escaped earlier strikes. According to Reuters, the war on Iran began in February with US-Israeli strikes, and Trump has repeatedly threatened the mountain site since July. Analysts have cautioned that even the heaviest US bunker-busting bombs may not guarantee the destruction of a facility buried roughly 100 metres deep.
The interview sent mixed signals. Just last week, Trump said the United States would not attack Iran before the November midterm elections and pointed to productive conversations with Tehran. Now he says the war will end “very soon,” claiming Iran is negotiating and has “asked us to please stop.” He also said he is talking to Russia and China about denuclearisation, without giving details.
The threat comes as oil markets stay on edge. US crude has held near $97 a barrel despite accelerated releases from emergency stockpiles, with Hormuz disruption and tanker attacks keeping traders nervous after Iran struck an LPG tanker in the Strait of Hormuz earlier this month.
No timeline for any strike was given. What is clear is that Pickaxe Mountain has moved to the top of Washington’s target list — and Trump wants Tehran to know it.
Sources: Reuters, Al Arabiya, JFeed, InvestingLive.
