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By Shane Croucher
Senior Editor
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On the eve of the midterms, President Donald Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that going after Pickaxe Mountain, a tunnel complex near Iran’s Natanz enrichment site, was "not a big deal." In fact, he said it could be done within an hour.
Sixteen months after Trump had declared Iran’s key uranium enrichment facilities "completely and totally obliterated," he is weighing a strike on the mountain where Israel and the U.S. believe Iran moved thousands of centrifuges after those bombs fell.
The gap between those two statements is the core lesson of Operation Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 strikes of Trump’s earlier "obliteration." The bombs did serious damage where they struck.
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But what they never produced was a final verdict. Even those initial U.S. claims of destruction were debated and disputed. Now Pickaxe, through geology and defiant Iranian policy, makes that problem all the worse.
Doubt, not compacted layers of rock-hard granite, is Iran’s real fortification there. It protects Iran three ways. First, it makes success harder to verify. Second, it keeps alive the possibility that something survived. And third, it turns every strike into a Washington fight.
Think back to the aftermath of Midnight Hammer. Three days after "obliterated," a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency assessment put the setback at a few months. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said years.
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At the NATO summit, Trump called the initial intelligence "very inconclusive" while insisting the program had nevertheless been set back decades. Hegseth had taunted any skeptics to "go there and get a big shovel."
A week later, the Pentagon’s spokesman settled on degraded for one to two years. More than a year on, Iran’s stockpile of more than 400 kilograms (882 pounds) of 60 percent enriched uranium is still located by belief rather than inspection.
Pickaxe compounds every unknown out there. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) calls it a "deeply buried granite fortification" and, after six years of satellite monitoring, can neither confirm nor refute that centrifuges are inside.
The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) puts the halls at least 100 meters (330 feet) down. Its latest elevation study hints at several levels.
Fordow’s attackers had more than 15 years of study behind them, including two Defense Department specialists who, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine recounted, meticulously watched Iran dig the site.
No schematics of Pickaxe have surfaced publicly, ISIS says, and no international inspector has ever been inside. Iran’s president has said satellite images can’t show what Pickaxe is for and called for inspectors to verify it—while his government keeps them out.
Nobody, not even an inspector, gets a shovel at Pickaxe.
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Even a flawless strike by the U.S., a second Midnight Hammer, would land in all that fog. America’s heaviest bunker buster, the 30,000-pound GBU-57, reportedly penetrates about 60 meters (197 feet).
Analysts at London’s Royal United Services Institute judged that, at such depths, even it would likely need repeated hits on one aim point. Collapsing the portals instead would buy time, they warned.
But, without follow-up strikes, Iran would likely start digging back in almost immediately.
The wildcard here is the nuclear option, which Tucker Carlson, the conservative host who once had the ear of the president, claims is an option under consideration. There is not proof of that, though the claim is understandably causing concern.
A nuclear weapon potentially could render the site unusable but would trade doubt for fallout.
A 2005 National Research Council study shows why it both tempts and repels. A 300-kiloton earth penetrator could severely damage granite tunnels about 150 meters (492 feet) down, but no penetrator can burrow deep enough to contain the blast.
It would also break a taboo on nuclear weapons that has survived since Nagasaki and Hiroshima, with profound—and perhaps cataclysmic—consequences for the world. What would then stop Russia using a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine?
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Trump, who has shown an aversion to nuclear weapons, has ruled out their use before, saying in April: "A nuclear weapon should never be allowed to be used by anybody." He repeated to Newsmax in October: "I wouldn’t use nuclear. We don’t have to."
Perhaps certainty of outcome is the wrong standard. Every working underground plant needs power, air, people, and deliveries, and the ISIS notes that each link is a vulnerability to facilities like that buried deep into Pickaxe.
Even hawks set their bar below rubble. A task force convened by the Jewish Institute for National Security of America defines success at Pickaxe as leaving it "inoperable and inaccessible"—or simply well-watched by intelligence services.
And Washington’s classified picture of the outcome may be far sharper than anything public. But denial without proof leaves much room for doubt, and that becomes a kind of rolling subscription.
CSIS calls bombing Iran every few months unsustainable. Each round would reopen the argument over what survived the blasts.
Doubt also creates an appetite for showiness from those with something to prove. Trump has touted the "mother of all bombs" before, which is the most-powerful conventional weapon available to the U.S. Its use could have a psychological effect.
A bomb chosen to be seen is aimed more at an audience than a mountain. The Carlson nuclear claim follows that logic to its end.
After Midnight Hammer, "obliterated" became the word to argue over rather than a fact to plan around. Strike Pickaxe, and the same argument would begin again, only from deeper underground. The tunnels might fall in an hour. Doubt would take a lot longer to collapse.
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