We may hit Pickaxe very soon: Trump warns over Iran's underground nuclear site

US President Donald Trump on Friday said the United States could strike Iran’s heavily fortified underground nuclear facility known as Pickaxe Mountain “very soon”, warning that Washington was closely monitoring activity at the site.Speaking to reporters at the Oval Office, Trump defended the months-long US military campaign against Iran, saying its main objective was to prevent Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon.“We’re in five months now. And you know what we did in five months? They’re not going to have a nuclear weapon, that’s what we did,” Trump said.He warned that the US could target Pickaxe Mountain if it detected activity at the facility. “We know everybody that’s moving at Pickaxe, we know everybody that’s moving everywhere all over Iran. And if anything goes bad, we hit them, we hit them hard,” Trump said.UNDERGROUND SITE NEAR NATANZPickaxe Mountain is located near Iran’s heavily damaged Natanz uranium-enrichment facility and is believed to contain two deeply buried tunnel systems. The site’s underground construction is thought to make it significantly more resistant to conventional aerial attacks. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Israeli intelligence believed Iran had moved thousands of centrifuges to the deeply buried facility.A US strike on the site could therefore represent a significant escalation in Washington’s campaign against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.TRUMP DEFENDS US MILITARY CAMPAIGNTrump said US military intervention had prevented a wider regional conflict, arguing that Iran would have posed a greater threat to Israel, the Middle East, Europe and the United States if Washington had not acted.“If we didn’t go in there, you wouldn’t have Israel right now, you wouldn’t have the Middle East, and they probably would go at European cities and our cities next,” Trump said.He reiterated that the US campaign had prevented Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.US STRIKES IRANIAN MILITARY TARGETSTrump’s remarks came days after US Central Command said American forces had completed a wave of strikes against Iranian military targets.CENTCOM said the operations targeted facilities linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including air-defence installations, radar systems, maritime assets, mine-laying capabilities and communications sites.The US military said the strikes followed what it described as recent attempted attacks by the IRGC against commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and US service members.TRUMP CLAIMS RADAR SYSTEMS DESTROYEDTrump also discussed recent US attacks on Iranian radar systems, claiming American forces had destroyed sophisticated radar installations twice.“They had very sophisticated radar, they brought in radar because we knocked it out once, and now we knocked it out twice. Now we don’t notice any activity,” Trump said.He suggested Iran had become reluctant to deploy additional radar systems because they were repeatedly being destroyed by US strikes.“I think they’re tired of putting it in and getting blown up,” Trump said.IRAN CONDEMNS US STRIKESIran has strongly condemned the latest US strikes, accusing Washington of violating its sovereignty and targeting non-military infrastructure and civilian sites across several provinces.Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said its armed forces had responded with what it described as “crushing defensive strikes” against US military bases in West Asia that Tehran said were being used as launching, support and staging points for American attacks.- EndsPublished By: Zafar ZaidiPublished On: Sep 5, 2026 05:34 IST