US President Donald Trump claimed Tuesday that the US will be striking Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain “probably pretty soon,” amid reports that Tehran has moved nuclear centrifuges, and possibly even enriched uranium, to the secretive underground enrichment site.

Trump, in a meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, clarified that those reports haven’t been confirmed before claiming that such a development “doesn’t mean anything” anyway because Iran doesn’t have access to its stockpiles of enriched uranium needed to create a bomb.

The US has claimed that Iran can’t reach the nuclear material it possesses because it is buried deep underground after US strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites last year. Trump insists that the US is monitoring those sites to make sure that the stockpiles are not retrieved.

Regardless, Trump declared, “We’ll be hitting that area probably pretty soon, and there’s not a thing they can do about it.”

“They’re trying to possibly reconstitute a site. We’ll hit that site. Any site where they’ve been thinking about nuclear, we’ll be hitting it very powerfully,” he added.

Trump has been threatening to strike Pickaxe for the past week in addition to other attacks on Iranian infrastructure if Iran doesn’t capitulate to US demands for free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump in the past has reportedly told advisers he prefers to keep Iran confused about his intentions by making bombastic threats, even if he doesn’t actually plan to carry them out.

CNN reported earlier this month that satellite imagery showed trucks going in and out of the facility at Pickaxe Mountain, possibly indicating that Iran is working to rebuild its nuclear facilities.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that Israeli intelligence has assessed that Iran has moved thousands of nuclear centrifuges into Pickaxe Mountain, burying them deep underground and making them harder to target in aerial strikes.

On Tuesday, CNN reported that Israel believes that Iran transferred some of its 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium to Pickaxe Mountain after the 12-day Israel-Iran war in June 2025.

The report quoted a single Israeli source assessing that “part” of the stockpile of 60% enriched uranium was moved to the fortified underground site.

An unsourced report on Israel’s Channel 12 said Pickaxe Mountain, which was constructed to be impervious to bombing, may well be able to withstand the kind of bunker-buster attacks the US used against three other Iranian nuclear facilities in the June 2025........

© The Times of Israel