President Donald Trump has threatened many times that the U.S. could attack Pickaxe Mountain, the secretive granite-swathed underground facility linked to Iran's cloaked nuclear weapons program. "It's not a big deal," he remarked earlier this week. U.S. operations could be done in as little as one hour, he suggested.
But the U.S. did not strike the site during the brief war in June 2025, nor in the months of assaults carried out with Israel from late February 2026. Some estimates put the heart of Pickaxe Mountain as far as 100 meters (nearly 330 feet) underground—meaning even the most destructive non-nuclear U.S. bombs, such as the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or "bunker busters," would be hard-pressed to destroy it. Conservative commentator and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said on Sunday—without providing evidence—that the U.S. government was weighing up a nuclear strike on Pickaxe Mountain.
"[T]he Trump administration may be within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran," he wrote on social media. The White House said the former Trump ally had "no insight into military planning" or the president's thinking. While unlikely, if Trump did greenlight the first use of a nuclear bomb since the American attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, analysts say it could encourage other nuclear powers to deploy their atomic arsenals while spurring others to chase nuclear capabilities and further radicalizing Iran's hardline factions.
But Carlson's claims raised the question: Just how far would the U.S. go to take out Pickaxe Mountain, and would it need to resort to a nuclear strike to get the job done? The U.S. has the world's second-largest nuclear arsenal, after Russia. It has both strategic nuclear weapons—generally thought of as able to level entire cities—and tactical nuclear weapons, which have a lower yield and comparatively less destructive power.
For a targeted military strike like on Pickaxe Mountain, the U.S. wouldn't use its strategic weapons, such as its nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles. Instead, it is more likely to use a tactical nuclear weapon, although any form of nuclear strike remains very unlikely. The U.S. has an estimated 200 B61 gravity bombs, half of which are deployed in bases across Europe.
They can be launched from fighter jets like the F-35A. The U.S. is rolling out the upgraded B61-13, which is designed to blast apart well-defended targets. Only strategic bombers can carry the B61-13, which has a yield of up to 360 kilotons—around 24 times the yield of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
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