President Trump’s threat to strike Pickaxe Mountain exposes the gap between rhetoric and reality. Iran’s Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La rises 1,608 meters in the Zagros, just 1.5 kilometers south of Natanz. Analysts place its main halls at least 100 meters beneath granite. Construction there began in late 2020 after the sabotage of the Natanz workshop. Four tunnel mouths—the only known means of access—sit in two pairs, east and west. The International Atomic Energy Agency has never entered the complex. However, Israeli assessments indicate that Iran moved centrifuges there after the June 2025 strikes. Those facts, not the force of Washington’s rhetoric, define the mission.

Equating Pickaxe with Fordow conflates two entirely different eras of Iranian fortification. Prior to the 2025 summer campaign, Fordow presented a significantly lower tactical threshold: its sedimentary geology was softer, its ventilation infrastructure was transparently mapped, and Western intelligence had spent fifteen years building a complete targeting profile. Pickaxe offers none of those advantages.

The U.S.-made GBU-57 massive ordnance penetrator can pierce roughly 60 meters of earth and 18 meters of reinforced concrete. But the hard granite shielding Iran’s “Pickaxe” site changes the math entirely, sharply degrading the weapon’s margins. Firing blindly at deep-buried barriers of unknown thickness is worse than a gamble; it risks squandering a scarce strategic asset while leaving the cascade halls........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)