President Donald Trump said the US is not done with Iran and warned that the next US target could be an underground nuclear site called Pickaxe Mountain.
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According to Reuters, Trump said the US will be hitting the Pickaxe Mountain area, which is near Iran’s badly damaged Natanz uranium enrichment site, “pretty soon.” As per AFP, Trump said, “We’ll be hitting that area pretty soon, and very heavily,” and added that he would not usually announce targets but “there’s not a thing they can do about it.” Trump made these remarks while speaking to reporters during a meeting with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun at the White House.
Trump also said it would take Iran a very long time to rebuild if the US stopped attacks now. “If we left right now, it would take Iran 20, 25 years to rebuild. Okay, and we’re not finished at all…we’re not leaving right now,” he said.
Iran increased its attacks in the Middle East on Tuesday, two weeks after its war with the US started again, with Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain coming under attack.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Israeli intelligence believes Iran moved thousands of uranium-enrichment centrifuges into tunnels deep inside a mountain last fall, Israeli and US officials say. This is a development that would heighten concerns that Tehran could reconstitute its nuclear program, the report added.
Israel passed along these intelligence findings to the US, saying the centrifuges were transferred to the Pickaxe Mountain site last fall. This happened after the 12-day war in June, when American and Israeli strikes pummeled Iran’s three main nuclear sites, according to the report.
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As per Reuters, Pickaxe Mountain is a heavily fortified site with two deeply buried tunnel complexes that experts believe are beyond the reach of even the most powerful bunker buster bombs the US has. The site is located 220 km (140 miles) south of Tehran and just 2 km (1.2 miles) from the Natanz nuclear complex. The peak itself rises to around 1,600 meters above sea level.
Construction at the site began in 2020, according to the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), after Iran said an act of sabotage caused an explosion at the Natanz facility. Iran’s then-nuclear chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, had said Iran was building “a more modern, larger and more comprehensive hall in all dimensions in the heart of the mountain near Natanz” for making advanced centrifuges, as per Reuters.
Rafael Grossi, chief of the UN nuclear watchdog, told PBS Frontline, that Iran had already said it planned to have nuclear activity at Pickaxe Mountain. “This was part of their quite systematic intention to put their most sensitive facilities underground,” he said.
