President Trump threatened on Tuesday to accelerate the war with Iran by returning the conflict to where it began, with a bunker-busting attack on one of the country’s nuclear facilities.
But the target he has in mind, known among Western intelligence agencies as Pickaxe Mountain, is not complete. No nuclear experts believe it houses the kind of working equipment to enrich uranium, and convert that material to bomb fuel, like the three major nuclear sites Mr. Trump ordered bombed in June 2025, in what the Pentagon called “Operation Midnight Hammer.”
At most, experts say, Pickaxe Mountain for now is a deep underground storage site.
But for Mr. Trump, facing a turning point in the war, it may make little difference whether Pickaxe Mountain is empty or giving cover to the surviving remnants of Iran’s stockpile of nuclear centrifuges, the machinery critical to churning out bomb fuel. In his own statements on Tuesday and those of his military advisers, who spent much of the afternoon dodging questions from Senate Democrats, Mr. Trump seemed mostly fixated on sending a message to Iran that his willingness to escalate knows no limits.
“We’ll be hitting that area probably pretty soon,” Mr. Trump said, not for the first time. “And there’s not a thing they can do about it,” the president said during a visit from Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun.
He went on to threaten military action against the Houthis, long financed by Iran, if they go ahead with their announced plan to block Saudi shipping from exiting the Red Sea, an increasingly vital alternative to the Strait of Hormuz.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth went further in threatening a deepening of the war effort, declaring that if Iran is “going to shoot at commercial shipping, then we’re going to hit them, as the president said, 10 times harder.”
Mr. Hegseth estimated the cost of the war so far at $37.5 billion, though he has asked for nearly twice that in supplemental funds to pay for the effort. And in his testimony, he used the spreading conflict as a justification for a requested increase in the Pentagon budget to $1.5 trillion, a more than 50 percent increase in one year.
At no point during the public testimony, however, did Mr. Hegseth articulate a broad explanation of why the defense budget needed to soar to those heights, other than blaming the administration of Joseph R. Biden Jr. for letting the military deteriorate.
“I don’t know what Lloyd Austin did for four years,” Mr. Hegseth said, referring to his predecessor. “I really don’t. The amount of neglect, the amount of stale thinking and bureaucracy was staggering when we took over.”
It was a rare critique by one defense secretary of another, especially since General Austin retired from the military as the four-star commander of Central Command, which oversaw American efforts in the Middle East and focused on threats emerging from Iran. Mr. Hegseth left the uniformed military as a major in the Reserves.
Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, told Mr. Hegseth his attacks on the previous administration were “a very, very obvious excuse for what I think is probably, as you described so often, gross negligence.”
But Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth have sounded increasingly besieged in recent days, unable to explain how their strategy of reimposing a blockade in the Persian Gulf, and escalating attacks on bridges, power stations and coastal missile sites, may produce Iranian concessions. Essentially the same approach, executed during the first 38 days of war beginning in February, failed to bring about the “unconditional surrender” that Mr. Trump once demanded.
By Tuesday, Mr. Trump was taking to social media to argue that Americans needed far more patience.
“Afghanistan War,” he wrote, referring to one of the several “forever wars” he vowed never to repeat. “20 years, 2,000 DEAD.”
“Iraq War: 9 years, 4,600 DEAD,” he continued.
“Vietnam War: 19 years and 5 months, 58,220 DEAD.”
And he compared those to his own military ventures.
“Venezuela War,” Mr. Trump wrote, though the seizure of President Nicolás Maduro was hardly a full-scale war. “1 day, 0 DEAD.”
Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, challenged Mr. Hegseth on his statements months ago that most of Iran’s arsenal of missiles had been “functionally destroyed.” She asked him to square that with continued attacks on Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and even Qatar, which is acting as a mediator between Iran and the United States.
Mr. Hegseth sidestepped the question, saying Iran had become a terror state and insisting the Iranians were “in the worst place they have ever been.”
But, he said, “they still have capabilities, no doubt.”
If Mr. Trump makes good on his threat to strike again at Pickaxe Mountain, it will be the first attack on a significant nuclear site since he attacked Iran on Feb. 28. So far, most of the nuclear sites have been exempted from new attacks, perhaps because bombing them further will only make it harder if the United States is serious about removing enriched uranium from the country.
But international inspectors believe it is unlikely there is much, if any, uranium at Pickaxe. Instead, they say there may be centrifuge parts, or complete machines, under the mountain, a hard target even for the largest bunker-busters in the American arsenal.
