Iran pushes hard on its nuclear rebuild daring Trump to strike again

“It’s a necessity more important than bread.”That’s how Iran’s rulers regard their drive to acquire nuclear weapons, an activist hard-liner recently declared.Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s surprise visit to Israel this week, leaks about US and Israeli military preparations, and remarks by President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggest Washington and Jerusalem are seriously weighing fresh strikes on Iran — largely to disrupt a nuclear rebuild that Tehran is now openly admitting.The regime’s unbending pursuit of nuclear weapons and its refusal to make peace remind us why it’s so dangerous — and why a new, limited round of military strikes may be necessary.One option reportedly under discussion: dropping the largest conventional bomb in the US arsenal, the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb — the “mother of all bombs” — to destroy access to Iran’s deeply buried Pickaxe Mountain complex.Trump said last week he may have to strike the site, because any Iranian push for nuclear weapons is intolerable.“They would use it,” he warned.US and Israeli strikes in 2025 and 2026 set Iran’s nuclear program back by more than two years.Now the Islamic Republic is attempting to make up for lost time by rebuilding its nuclear-weapons option underground.In addition to Pickaxe, Tehran is openly reconstituting its program at several sites that should top the US target lists.At Minzadehei, a facility where a key nuclear component was manufactured, the Institute for Science and International Security spotted rapid rebuilding activity in satellite images from September and October.Israeli forces struck and all but destroyed the site back in March.A parallel reconstruction effort is underway at Taleghan 2, an above-ground bunker long linked by the International Atomic Energy Agency with high-explosive work and warhead experiments.Israel hit Taleghan 2 in October 2024 and again in March 2026, after an earlier rebuild resto...