What is Pickaxe Mountain? Trump says US will hit Iranian nuclear site 'pretty soon'

Pickaxe Mountain, under construction, has been spared in past attacks.

President Donald Trump said Tuesday the U.S. would target Pickaxe Mountain, an Iranian nuclear site that is under construction and buried deep below the ground, as the war escalates amid 10 straight days of strikes.

"We'll be hitting that area pretty soon, and very heavily," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, repeating a threat he's made against the site in recent weeks.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Israeli intelligence assessed Iran transferred centrifuges, which could be used to enrich uranium, the essential process in building a nuclear weapon, to Pickaxe Mountain last fall.

The facility has been under construction for years and is only miles away from Natanz, one of three nuclear site targeted by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes in a June 2025 operation.

Trump did not deny the Wall Street Journal report when asked by a reporter. The president said Iran "may have" moved the centrifuges there, but "we don't have it on record."

"Maybe this one they have right," Trump said about the newspaper. "But it's okay. It doesn't mean anything unless they have the material."

"We follow the material," Trump said, referring to the uranium itself.

Iran is believed to possess close to 1,000 pounds of highly-enriched uranium, which is near weapons-grade and which Trump has said the U.S. would secure in order to ensure the military campaign was successful in inhibiting Iran's progress toward a nuclear weapon.

Separate from the discussion around Pickaxe, Trump said there was evidence Iran was looking to rebuild its nuclear program, which was severely damaged in U.S. strikes last summer but apparently spared so far in the war in Iran, which began in February.

"They're trying to possibly reconstitute a site," Trump said Tuesday. "We'll hit that site. Any site where they're even thinking about nuclear, we'll be hitting it very, very powerfully."

Reporting from the Wall Street Journal said it was unclear whether the transfer of centrifuges to Pickaxe represented an effort to build an enrichment site or was merely done to protect the equipment from destruction.

Known as Kūh-e Kolang or "Mount Kolang" in Iran, the complex includes a series of tunnels and facilities built into the mountain. It was declared in 2021 by Iran to be a centrifuge assembly site after a similar plant in neighboring Natanz was destroyed.

Analysts at the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), who reviewed recent satellite imagery, say that construction is still underway at the site. They add th