Tension is building over the purported relocation of nuclear centrifuges to Iran’s deep bunker complex inside Pickaxe Mountain. Located deep within the Zagros Mountain range, the complex is nearly 300 miles from the northern Persian Gulf. President Donald Trump stated on Tuesday that the United States would be bombing the complex “pretty soon, very heavily, and there is nothing [Iran] can do about it.”
The question is, how? How to destroy a facility located hundreds of feet underground?
The major problem is that most analysts do not believe that even the deepest penetrating U.S. weapons, such as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, could reach the facility. It’s just too deep. Tactical nuclear weapons are not a viable option in that they would reduce the threshold for the use of those weapons by other actors. Russia would love an excuse to use a tactical nuclear weapon to regain the initiative in its war with Ukraine, for example.
Nor is the ground force option of destroying Pickaxe Mountain from the inside out a reasonable one. Yes, it could be accomplished. But it would be too costly in casualties and have too great a risk of failure to be justified from a U.S. interest perspective. The same is true of a ground operation to recover uranium stockpiles from Iran’s Fordow facility. That said, the U.S. military can address these threats by turning both Pickaxe and Fordow into rotting prisons. Doing so will require a mix of heavy air power and persistent surveillance.
Whether by a diplomatic agreement with Iran that ensures International Atomic Energy Agency inspector access to these facilities, or via military force, the threats they pose clearly must be resolved. It also bears noting that a fixation on U.S. casualty numbers represents a political and emotional preference over good strategy. If you go to war, you must accept that some casualties will be incurred. “War,” as Gen. William Sherman observed, “is hell.” The key is to mitigate potential casualties as far as the mission allows.
To be clear, this was always a foolish, unnecessary war. Rather than focusing on military operations to keep Iran’s nuclear program bottled up, Trump allowed himself to be strategically blinded by Delta Force’s January 2026 success in capturing former Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. Trump was then wooed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into believing that a sharp air campaign would bring down the Iranian regime. Trump fired from the hip and missed.
Yet, until Iran fulfills its obligations under the ceasefire accord, the U.S. has little option but to increase military pressure on the regime. And that brings us back to the prison option.
The good news is that when it comes to Pickaxe Mountain and Fordow, these targets are not mobile in the same way as Iranian missile and drone forces around the Strait of Hormuz. They cannot hide. The U.S. very likely also knows the locations of the key road, ventilation, fuel, communications, and other access nodes for these complexes. In turn, heavy air strikes against these locations can turn the underground facilities they serve into effective prisons. And not just prisons, coffins. After all, if you don’t have power, water, food, and air supplies, you’re not going to last very long. Iran might be able to protect the infrastructure inside these facilities, but it won’t be able to make much use of them. Almost certainly not to the degree that would allow Iran to break out toward developing and deploying a nuclear weapon. The U.S. can also keep bombing the same coordinates as in previous strikes and thus burrowing deeper toward the facilities themselves.
TOM ROGAN: ANDY BURNHAM’S TOP CABINET PICK IS GOOD NEWS FOR THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP
There will be a cost to this effort. Persistent surveillance of these targets and their supporting nodes will require extensive drone coverage and readily available strike assets in case the Iranians try to remove rubble, construct new nodes, etc. Still, this option offers a means of addressing the threat without risking dozens or perhaps even hundreds of American lives.
Israel may decide to one day launch a risky Entebbe-style ground force action to enter and destroy these facilities from the inside out. But for the U.S., absent a diplomatic resolution, the prison-coffin option is the most desirable.