President Trump threatened on Tuesday to accelerate the war with Iran by returning the conflict to where it began, with a bunker-busting attack on one of the country’s nuclear facilities.
But the target he has in mind, known among Western intelligence agencies as Pickaxe Mountain, is not complete. No nuclear experts believe it houses the kind of working equipment to enrich uranium, and convert that material to bomb fuel, like the three major nuclear sites Mr. Trump ordered bombed in June 2025, in what the Pentagon called “Operation Midnight Hammer.”
At most, experts say, Pickaxe Mountain for now is a deep underground storage site.
But for Mr. Trump, facing a turning point in the war, it may make little difference whether Pickaxe Mountain is empty or giving cover to the surviving remnants of Iran’s stockpile of nuclear centrifuges, the machinery critical to churning out bomb fuel. In his own statements on Tuesday and those of his military advisers, who spent much of the afternoon dodging questions from Senate Democrats, Mr. Trump seemed mostly fixated on sending a message to Iran that his willingness to escalate knows no limits.
“We’ll be hitting that area probably pretty soon,” Mr. Trump said, not for the first time. “And there’s not a thing they can do about it,” the president said during a visit from Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun. » | David E. Sanger | David E. Sanger has reported on the efforts to counter Iran’s nuclear capabilities for more than two decades. | Tuesday, July 21, 2026
Trump is in a bind. He’s got himself into a war he probably cannot and will not win, and he doesn’t know how to get out of and at the same time save his face, either. What a predicament to be in. The Iranians are outsmarting him all the time. — © Mark Alexander
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