On the eve of the midterms, President Donald Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that going after Pickaxe Mountain, a tunnel complex near Iran’s Natanz enrichment site, was "not a big deal." In fact, he said it could be done within an hour. Sixteen months after Trump had declared Iran’s key uranium enrichment facilities "completely and totally obliterated," he is weighing a strike on the mountain where Israel and the U.S. believe Iran moved thousands of centrifuges after those bombs fell. The gap between those two statements is the core lesson of Operation Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 strikes of Trump’s earlier "obliteration." The bombs did serious damage where they struck.
But what they never produced was a final verdict. Even those initial U.S. claims of destruction were debated and disputed. Now Pickaxe, through geology and defiant Iranian policy, makes that problem all the worse.
Doubt, not compacted layers of rock-hard granite, is Iran’s real fortification there. It protects Iran three ways. First, it makes success harder to verify.
Second, it keeps alive the possibility that something survived. And third, it turns every strike into a Washington fight. Think back to the aftermath of Midnight Hammer.
Three days after "obliterated," a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency assessment put the setback at a few months. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said years. At the NATO summit, Trump called the initial intelligence "very inconclusive" while insisting the program had nevertheless been set back decades.
Hegseth had taunted any skeptics to "go there and get a big shovel." A week later, the Pentagon’s spokesman settled on degraded for one to two years. More than a year on, Iran’s stockpile of more than 400 kilograms (882 pounds) of 60 percent enriched uranium is still located by belief rather than inspection. Pickaxe compounds every unknown out there.
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