On September 22, speaking to Arab and Muslim leaders on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, Donald Trump returned to a nuclear site that has increasingly occupied American and Israeli attention. “We may have to blow up another one, Pickaxe Mountain,” he said. “We’re not seeing a lot of activity there, but if we do, we’ll blow it up immediately.”

Trump has a reason to be watching the mountain.

In July, The Wall Street Journal reported that Israeli intelligence had concluded that Iran moved thousands of uranium-enrichment centrifuges into Pickaxe Mountain in the fall of 2025, after the twelve-day war. According to US and Israeli officials cited in the report, Israel shared that intelligence with Washington.

Neither Israel nor the United States has published the evidence behind that assessment. But the International Atomic Energy Agency cannot tell us where all of Iran’s centrifuges are either. Its ability to account for them had already deteriorated years earlier. By 2024, France, Germany and the United Kingdom described the problem bluntly: “The IAEA does not know how many centrifuges Iran has and where they are located.”

The sequence of events at Pickaxe is difficult to dismiss as accidental. Iran has spent years building its most protected nuclear complex, and after the destruction of much of its nuclear infrastructure, Israeli intelligence says thousands of centrifuges were moved inside it. Pickaxe is not simply where Iran may be hiding what survived the last war. It appears to be where Iran is preparing for the next stage of its nuclear program.

The history of the mountain helps explain why.

Known in Iran as Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, the complex lies south of Natanz. Iran began building the underground facility after an explosion seriously damaged an above-ground centrifuge assembly plant at Natanz in 2020. Tehran subsequently announced that the replacement would be built underground. The IAEA has not been allowed to inspect the completed complex.

Pickaxe goes much deeper than Iran’s previous nuclear facilities. Its tunnels were excavated more than 300 feet underground, beneath a mountain composed largely of hard rock.

That geology matters because centrifuges are extraordinarily delicate machines.

Fordow demonstrated the problem.........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)