President Donald Trump said Tuesday that any Iranian facility suspected of nuclear activity, including a newly identified site Tehran is believed to be trying to bring online, will be struck “very, very powerfully,” underscoring that the core rationale for the war he launched in February remains unchanged five months later.
The comments came during a wide-ranging press availability in the Oval Office alongside Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, after a reporter asked how long it would take Iran to rebuild its capabilities if the United States were to halt operations. Trump used the question to pivot to what he described as Iran’s ongoing attempt to reconstitute a nuclear-related site, expressing incredulity that Tehran would pursue such a project while the war itself stems from concerns over its nuclear ambitions.
“They’re In This Because of Nuclear Weapons”
“You know, the new site that they’re talking about. I mean, how about these people? They’re in this because of nuclear weapons and they’re trying to possibly reconstitute a site. We’ll hit that site. Any site where they’re even thinking about nuclear, we’ll be hitting it very, very powerfully now,” Trump said. He added that the extent of the damage already inflicted on Iran remains known only to the Iranians themselves, estimating a recovery timeline of 20 to 25 years. “Nobody knows except the Iranians the damage that we’ve done to them. We have done damage that will take them 20-25 years to recover from. So if we left tomorrow, we had a, we had a big success, but we’re not leaving tomorrow,” he said.
Pickaxe Mountain Comes Into Focus
Trump did not name the site directly in that exchange, but a follow-up question from Hayley Bull of Scripps News made clear which facility reporters believed he was referencing: a hardened underground complex known as Pickaxe Mountain, located roughly a mile south of Iran’s Natanz nuclear complex. Asked whether Iran had moved nuclear centrifuges into the site and what remained to be finished in the campaign, Trump said U.S. intelligence had not confirmed the reports but did not rule them out. “They may have. We don’t have it on record. All we do is read the fake news… maybe this one they have right, but it’s OK. It doesn’t mean anything unless they have the material,” he said, adding that the site would likely be targeted soon. “We’ll be hitting that area very probably pretty soon, and there’s not a thing they can do about it.”
Reporting from Israeli and U.S. officials, first published by the Wall Street Journal and corroborated across Israeli outlets in recent days, has described Pickaxe Mountain as a facility where Iran is believed to have moved thousands of uranium-enrichment centrifuges into deeply buried tunnels. Experts estimate the underground complex extends roughly 90 to 137 meters beneath solid rock, and Trump said last week the U.S. would be prepared to strike the site, calling it “a possible target for a nice, big, fat shot right near the front door.” The site, known in Iran as Mount Kolang Gaz La, has been monitored by U.S. and Israeli intelligence for years, and analysts caution that moving centrifuges there does not necessarily mean Iran has established an active enrichment facility.
The Institute for Science and International Security, a nonproliferation-focused research organization, has tracked construction at the site since 2020. Construction of the facility began in the fall of 2020, with Iran announcing at the time that the underground halls were intended to replace an above-ground advanced centrifuge assembly facility at Natanz that had been destroyed. In 2025, Iran began constructing a double security perimeter with a patrol route surrounding the mountain, and all four tunnel entrances have since been hardened with layers of concrete and earth.
A separate analysis published by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies this month reported that satellite imagery shows continued construction at the site. New analysis of satellite imagery indicates that Iran is continuing construction at the deeply buried facility in violation of the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding, and while Iran has maintained since 2021 that Pickaxe Mountain is merely a centrifuge manufacturing facility, Western intelligence agencies suspect Tehran is also building an undeclared uranium enrichment plant there. The site is reportedly buried deeper than Iran’s Fordow enrichment plant, which was struck by U.S. forces in June 2025, raising questions about whether current American bunker-penetrating munitions could reach it.
A Recurring Justification for the War
Trump’s comments reinforced a rationale he has repeated throughout the conflict: that the war exists specifically to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, and that the administration views any activity resembling reconstitution as an automatic trigger for further strikes. Earlier in the same availability, he credited both his 2018 withdrawal from the nuclear agreement negotiated during the Obama administration and the 2025 strikes on Iranian nuclear sites with preventing what he described as a nuclear-armed Iran that could have threatened Israel’s existence. “It’s a very simple dictum. They cannot have a nuclear weapon and they won’t have. They’re not going to, they have no chance of having a nuclear weapon,” Trump said.
Timing and Context
The comments came the same week that reports of Iranian activity at Pickaxe Mountain gained renewed attention in Israeli and American press, and days after U.S. forces confirmed one of the deadliest stretches for American troops since the war began, following a weekend in which multiple service members were killed. The renewed focus on the mountain facility suggests that even as the administration touts battlefield degradation of Iran’s conventional forces, the nuclear question remains the central unresolved issue keeping the two sides from a lasting settlement.
Trump gave no indication of a timeline beyond describing a strike as likely “pretty soon,” and he did not say whether such an operation would be conducted unilaterally by U.S. forces or in coordination with Israel, which has pushed Washington to resume larger-scale strikes on Iranian targets in recent weeks.