Taking out Irans Pickaxe nuclear site is key heres how Trump can do it

At Pickaxe Mountain, Iran thinks it has built a nuclear fortress America can’t destroy.President Donald Trump can’t afford to let that illusion survive another week.Fortunately, he has options.Tehran has followed the same playbook for decades, secretly building underground nuclear sites that become the workhorses of its drive for the bomb.Pickaxe appears to be the latest and potentially most dangerous.Back in 2020, Tehran’s nuclear chief warned that workers were excavating the site for “a more modern, vaster, and inclusive building” — “working 24/7 to move all our sensitive work into the heart of this mountain.”Since then, Iran has spent six years carving Pickaxe into what it hopes will be an indestructible nuclear sanctuary.This is more than double the time it spent secretly building its enrichment plants at Fordow and Natanz before being caught.Both those sites were already in “an advanced stage of construction” when inspections occurred.Inspectors still have never been to Pickaxe, and it appears unlikely they ever will.Satellite imagery suggests the facility may well be large enough to reconstitute many, possibly all, of Iran’s core nuclear activities: centrifuge storage and production, uranium enrichment and stockpiling and even weaponization.This is helped by Iran’s technological advances in recent years, which minimize its need for floor space, and time, to dash for a bomb.A recent report says Iran might now be moving enrichment centrifuges to Pickaxe; it’s been observed working on the site in recent months.Trump himself warned this year that Iran was undertaking new activities at a site “protected by granite.”Yet Pickaxe went untouched in Operations Midnight Hammer last year and Epic Fury in the spring.Iran is banking on the site being impenetrable in a way that its other subterranean sites were not.Initial estimates suggested it could be even further underground than Fordow, Iran’s most sensitive and deepest-buried enrich...