The One Iranian Target America's Biggest Bomb Might Not Reach | Prof Jiang Xueqin

[00:00:00]There is a mountain in central Iran that the most powerful military in human history has now bombed around, flown over, photographed from orbit, and studied for six straight years and never once touched. Not in June of 2025 when American bombers flattened three Iranian nuclear sites in a single night. Not in February of this year when this war began. Not last week, not last night. It sits about a mile south of Natans. Close enough that you can see both from the same satellite frame. Close enough that the security fence around the mountain physically connects to the fence around the enrichment complex. And for 6 years, Iran has been digging into it. Yesterday in the Oval Office, the president of the United States stopped hinting. He said the area would be hit probably pretty soon and that there was not a thing Iran could do about it. In a separate interview, he was blunderter still. He said, "America is going to take out Pickax Mountain." And told the Iranians to be ready. That is not a leak. That is not an anonymous official. That is a head of state naming a target in public and daring the other side to prepare for it. Now, here is the part that almost nobody is handling carefully. A number of weapons experts have publicly questioned whether the United States can actually destroy what is inside that mountain. Not whether it should, whether it can. Because the facility is believed to sit roughly 100 m underground. And the largest conventional bunker busting weapon in the American inventory, a 30,000 lb bomb built specifically for this exact category of problem 8, may not be enough, which produces something genuinely strange. The most publicly promised strike of this entire war may also be the one target America cannot guarantee it can kill. Before we go further, one thing I want to be straight about. Everything here comes from my own research into publicly available reporting. And a fair amount of it is my own analysis rather than confirmed fact.

[00:02:05]I will tell you which is which as we go.

[00:02:07]None of this is financial, legal, investment, or political advice. And I would genuinely encourage you to check every claim yourself. So let's do this properly. What is actually inside that mountain? why Iran built it where it built it, why it survived two separate American bombing campaigns untouched, and what happens to this war on the day somebody finally decides to find out whether the bombs are big enough because the answer to that last question is not really about a mountain at all. Let's start with the name because the name tells you something. In Persian, it is Ku Kolang Gazla. Kolang translates to pickaxe. So, Western media, analysts, and eventually the president of the United States all ended up calling it Pickaxe Mountain. Worth knowing that is not necessarily what Iranians officially call the site. It is a translation that stuck in the West and then hardened into a proper noun. When you hear an American official say Pickax Mountain, you're hearing a nickname that came out of analytical reports and satellite imagery briefings. Geographically, it sits in the Zagros range in Isvahan Province, roughly 1 and a half kilometers south of the Natans Enrichment Complex. The mountain itself rises to about 168 m above sea level. Hold on to that number.

[00:03:26]It is going to matter more than almost anything else in this video. Because there is a comparison that the analysts keep making and once you understand it, the entire strategic picture reorganizes itself around a single physical fact.

[00:03:39]The mountain above pickaxe is considerably taller than the mountain above Fordo. Fordo. You remember Fordo?

[00:03:46]The deeply buried enrichment site that dominated a decade of non-prololiferation debate. The site that was considered the hardest target in Iran. The one that required the biggest bombs America had and that even then produced years of argument about whether the damage was real or theatrical. Pickaxes deeper. Now, let's talk about what is actually there. And I want to be careful here because this is a place where confident sounding people say things they cannot possibly know.

[00:04:14]Construction began in 2020. At the time, Iran declared it to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations Nuclear Watchdog, as a future facility.

[00:04:23]Its stated purpose was centrifuge assembly. Iran said it would replace a centrifuge plant at Natans that had been destroyed. And analysts at the Institute for Science and International Security noted the replaced plant had been built to assemble something on the order of 6,000 centrifuges a year. So on paper, this is a factory, a place where you build the machines that enrich uranium rather than a place where you enrich it.

[00:04:51]That distinction is enormous and we will come back to it. The site covers roughly one square kilometer of mountainside.

[00:04:58]Iran has built a security perimeter several kilometers long around the entire mountain and connected it directly to the perimeter around Natans.

[00:05:06]Two paved roads climbed toward an area containing tunnel entrances. By the assessment of the Institute for Science and International Security, there are four tunnel portals in total excavated into a channel of rock. Two of them have entrance extensions that have been hardened with layers of concrete and earth. And here's a detail I find genuinely revealing. After the wars, Iran partially backfilled the pair of eastern tunnel entrances enough to obstruct ground vehicles, but crucially not sealing them fully. Compare that to what Iran did elsewhere. At Fordo, at the Esvahan tunnel, at an older 2007 tunnel complex on this very same site, entrances were sealed. Not here, not fully. You do not leave a door half open by accident when you're this careful about everything else. My red, and this is analysis, not established fact, is that halfback filling is the behavior of an organization that intends to come back through that door. So what is behind it? The honest answer is that nobody outside Iran knows. The IAEA has never gained access to the deep tunnels.

[00:06:15]Not once. 6 years of construction, an international inspection regime that exists precisely for this purpose, and the door has stayed shut. Which means every assessment you will ever hear about Pickax Mountain, including mine, is built from satellite imagery, excavation, spoil analysis, construction pattern recognition, and inference. Not from anyone walking inside with a clipboard and a radiation detector. That absence of access is not a footnote. It is arguably the most consequential fact in this entire story and I will show you exactly why in a few minutes. But first, we need to talk about what happened in the summer of 2025 because that is when this mountain stopped being a construction project and started becoming the center of gravity for an entire war. In June of 2025, during a 12-day conflict between Israel and Iran, the United States conducted an operation against Iran's nuclear infrastructure.

[00:07:12]Three sites were struck. Natans, Fordau, and Isvahan. Pickax Mountain was not hit. There was one minor exception, the destruction of a vehicle on a nearby spoil pile, which analysts assess was most likely tied to air defense rather than the tunnel complex itself. But the facility under construction was left alone. Then something happened that tells you more about Iranian strategy than any speech any Iranian official has ever given. Construction accelerated.

[00:07:43]Satellite image analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that after the June 2025 strikes, work at Pickax Mountain intensified.

[00:07:53]Security walls went up around the entire site. Tunneling extended west, east, and south. Think about what that means as a decision. America had just demonstrated publicly and violently that it was willing and able to strike Iranian nuclear infrastructure. The rational response if you were purely trying to avoid provocation would be to slow down, to go quiet, to not draw attention. Iran did the opposite. It dug faster. That is not the behavior of a state hedging its bets. That is the behavior of a state that has concluded above ground and shallow facilities are permanently indefensible. and that the only survivable nuclear infrastructure is infrastructure buried beyond the reach of the enemy's best weapon. The strikes did not deter the program. They relocated it downward. And this is where I want you to sit with an uncomfortable idea because it runs against how this conflict gets narrated on both sides.

[00:08:48]Every successful strike on a shallow target teaches your adversary to build deeper. Which means a bombing campaign against a nuclear program is not simply a subtraction problem. It is also an education program. You are with every hit tuitionf funding your opponent's next generation of hardening. That is not an argument that the strikes were wrong. It is an argument that the strikes had a second effect alongside the first one. And that second effect is the mountain we are talking about today.

[00:09:19]Now the technical question, the one that everything else hangs on. Can it actually be destroyed? Let's talk about the weapon because the weapon is the whole argument. The GBU57 is called the massive ordinance penetrator and the name is not marketing. It weighs roughly 30,000 lbs at about 14,000 kg. It is not designed to explode on contact. It is designed to survive contact. A penetrator works on a principle that is closer to a nail than a bomb. Mass, velocity, and an extremely hard casing drive the weapon down through rock and reinforced concrete. A delayed fuse holds the detonation until the weapon has reached depth. The explosion happens underground inside the target where the confined blast and shock do work that a surface detonation never could. It is an extraordinary piece of engineering. It is also the largest conventional weapon of its type that America possesses and it can only be delivered by a very small number of aircraft. And weapons experts have publicly questioned whether even that is enough to reach a facility believed to be around 100 m down under a mountain that stands over 1,600 m tall.

[00:10:32]Now, I want to be precise because this is exactly the kind of thing that gets distorted. The public expert commentary is skeptical, not conclusive. Nobody outside a very small number of cleared targeting cells knows the real answer because the real answer depends on variables that are classified or unknown. The actual depth, the geology of that specific rock, the internal layout of the tunnels, the reinforcement of the chambers, and how many weapons you are willing to put into the same hole in sequence. That last one matters more than people realize. Penetrating weapons can be used serially. You can put one into the ground to open the path and follow it with another into the same crater. It is a brutal, expensive, technically demanding way to dig and it is a real option. So the honest framing is not America cannot destroy pickaxe mountain. The honest framing is that this is the first target in this war where America cannot promise the outcome in advance. And that is a genuinely new condition for this campaign because think about what has defined American operations against Iran since February.

[00:11:42]Precision, predictability, the ability to state an intention and then produce exactly that result. Radar sites, command nodes, air defense batteries, coastal installations. These are targets where the relationship between weapon and effect is well understood. Pickaxe Mountain breaks that relationship. Which brings us to a strategic problem that I think is far more interesting than the engineering one. What happens if you announce a strike, execute it, and then cannot prove it worked? Because you would not be able to prove it. Not immediately and possibly not for years.

[00:12:15]A 100 meters of rock is opaque to almost every sensor. You could put every weapon in the inventory into that mountain and the honest post strike assessment might still be a shrug and a range of probabilities. And Iran knows that, which means an Iranian regime could survive that strike and simply say nothing was damaged and the world would have no way to check because the IAA has never been inside in the first place.

[00:12:42]There is no baseline. You cannot measure destruction against a record that does not exist. That is the strategic trap buried in this mountain. And I don't think it is being discussed nearly enough. 6 years of denied access did not just hide a facility. It removed the world's ability to ever verify the facility's destruction. Hold that thought because it explains something about the diplomacy that otherwise looks irrational. There was a moment recently where a radio host asked the president directly whether he would insist on IA inspectors being allowed into pickaxe mountains deep tunnels before any new agreement with Iran was signed specifically to confirm that nothing catastrophic was being concealed inside.

[00:13:26]That question is the entire non-prololiferation crisis compressed into one sentence. Because an agreement without access to that mountain is an agreement about everything except the thing that matters most. And an Iranian government that grants access to that mountain gives up the single greatest source of strategic ambiguity it possesses. Ambiguity is a weapon. It is arguably Iran's most effective one. A program you cannot see is a program your adversary must plan against at its maximum plausible size rather than its actual size. Uncertainty forces your enemy to spend, to deploy, to hedge, and to hesitate. Iran does not need a bomb to get value out of pickaxe mountain. It only needs you to be unable to rule one out. Now, let's zoom out because none of this is happening in a vacuum. There is a war going on around this mountain and it is escalating right now tonight as you watch this. Let me lay out the timeline cleanly because a lot of coverage has blurred it. This war began on the 28th of February this year. The president announced major combat operations against Iran and the United States and Israel launched largecale joint strikes on military, government and infrastructure sites. The opening night was by any measure one of the most technologically layered operations in modern military history. Tomahawk cruise missiles, stealth fighters, and for the first time in combat lowcost one-way attack drones built on a design philosophy borrowed from Iran itself.

[00:15:02]That detail deserves a moment. The United States entering combat with cheap, expendable attack drones is the doctrinal echo of Ukraine. It is the American military conceding that mass and costefficiency matter alongside exquisite precision. A weapon category that Iran arguably pioneered as an asymmetric tool was turned around and used against it. The opening phase also included events that remained deeply contested and in one case deeply painful. On that first day, a strike in Manab in Hormosan province destroyed an elementary school. The reported death toll was 156 people, primarily school children. A United States military internal investigation corroborated that the strike was likely American, while noting the investigation had not reached a final conclusion. It was condemned by the Iranian government, by UNESCO, and by international human rights organizations. I am including that because I do not think you can honestly cover this war and leave it out. If a channel presents this conflict as a clean series of precision successes, that channel is selling you something.

[00:16:11]From there, the war ground on for months. Iranian ballistic missile and drone barges against American bases across Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, and Jordan. Israeli and American strikes across Iranian territory. Iranian officials killed, including, according to public reporting, the Supreme Leader himself. Then in June, something that looked like an off-ramp appeared.

[00:16:34]American and Iranian delegations entered negotiations aimed at a warending deal built around a memorandum of understanding signed by both countries.

[00:16:44]The core of it concerned the straight of Hormuz. And here is the thing about that memorandum. Even after it was signed, both sides kept shooting, which tells you the memorandum was never really an agreement. It was a document that described an agreement both parties wanted the other one to be bound by. By early July, it was collapsing and then it collapsed completely. Now, let's talk about where the war actually is as of today because the intensity has ramped sharply. The United States has been bombing Iran for 11 consecutive nights.

[00:17:16]Tonight is the 11th. Strikes hit targets across the country with air defense systems firing over Tyrron itself.

[00:17:24]Sentcom has described the target set as Iranian military command centers, air defense and coastal surveillance sites, maritime capabilities, missile and drone launch sites, and communications networks with the stated objective of degrading Iran's ability to control the strait of Hormuz. Read that objective again because it is the key to the whole war, not the nuclear program, the strait. Iran's response has continued along familiar lines. On Wednesday, Iranian forces fired six missiles and four drones into Jordanian territory.

[00:17:59]Jordan's armed forces reported that eight of the 10 projectiles were intercepted with two missiles falling in remote areas. No injuries, no damage.

[00:18:08]Air raid sirens sounded in Bahrain.

[00:18:10]Saudi Arabia's civil defense issued a danger warning in Dam on the Persian Gulf Coast. Iran claimed a fresh wave of drone strikes on American positions in Kuwait. And the cost of this is not abstract. The Pentagon has identified Sergeant Angel S. Rampers, 28 years old, from Ozone Park, New York, as believed killed in action on July 17th during an enemy attack at Muafak Salty Air Base in Jordan. He was assigned to an air defense artillery regiment. He had been listed as missing before his remains were located. As of a few days ago, three American service members had been killed since the previous Friday. I read that name out because these numbers move very fast in coverage like this and it is worth remembering that each one is a specific person from a specific place.

[00:18:59]Now the money testifying before Congress on Tuesday, the Secretary of Defense put the cost of the war with Iran at 37.5 billion so far, but experts told CNN the real bill is likely considerably higher.

[00:19:15]A senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies made the key point. That figure does not incorporate operational costs already baked into the Pentagon's fiscal year budget, which exceeds $1 trillion. So 37.5 billion is the marginal cost, the additional spend, not the total resources committed. For scale, that marginal figure alone is larger than the entire annual defense budget of most countries on Earth. five months of one campaign. And in that same testimony came a claim I found genuinely striking because it reframes what this war has actually been about. The Secretary of Defense said that an American military effort to guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz had continued covertly after it was publicly announced in May and that it had helped move up to 500 million barrels of oil through the waterway. with the United States retaining control despite Iranian attacks. He asserted the American military has been in control of moving traffic in the straight for quite some time. Now, that claim comes with an immediate caveat and it is an important one. Public ship tracking data shows traffic through the straight has dropped sharply during the tit fortat strikes of the past 10 days. So, you have two things that are both true. Convoys are moving and far fewer ships are going, which is what a contested waterway looks like. not closed, not open, expensive.

[00:20:39]Alongside that, the naval blockade of Iranian ports was reimposed last week.

[00:20:43]Sentcom stated that as of July 20th, the American military had redirected seven commercial vessels and disabled one to prevent ships leaving or entering Iranian ports. Disabled one. That is the sentence that carries the weight. A blockade is only a blockade if refusal has consequences. And the legal architecture of the whole dispute got laid out very clearly this week by the secretary of state speaking in Manila at the ASEAN gathering. He warned of creating a dangerous precedent by allowing Iran to control the straight of Hormuz arguing Iran has no right under any existing legal mechanism to control transit through an international waterway. He framed the stakes as the fundamental principle of freedom of navigation and said that if that principle is threatened, the global economy is threatened along with the rules that have underpinned a century and a half of international trade. That is not rhetorical inflation. That is a fairly precise statement of what the United States believes it is defending and it clarifies something about this war that the nuclear headlines obscure.

[00:21:47]The straight of Hormuz was fully open for free and safe passage before the February strikes. It is Iran that now treats control of the waterway as its most valuable negotiating leverage. And in recent weeks, Iranian forces have repeatedly fired on vessels that Iran said had not coordinated with Iranian authorities before transiting. So here is the structure of the conflict stripped of both sides framing. America is fighting to keep a waterway open.

[00:22:14]Iran is fighting to prove it can close it. Everything else, the mountain, the centrifuges, the proxies, the missile inventories, sits downstream of that single contest, which raises the obvious question. If this war is about the strait, why is the president talking about a mountain in Isvahan province? I think there are three answers and they operate at once. The first is straightforward and stated openly. The president has repeatedly and unambiguously said Iran will never be permitted a nuclear weapon. On Tuesday, he extended that to say that any site where Iran is even thinking about nuclear work will be hit very very powerfully. If you hold that position sincerely, Pickax Mountain is not optional. It is the logical terminus of the policy. You cannot claim to be preventing a weapon while leaving the deepest unexamined facility in the country untouched. The second is about leverage and it is more interesting.

[00:23:04]Negotiations collapsed. Talks are being mediated through Pakistan. Iran's interior minister traveled there this week for discussions aimed at potentially reviving the ceasefire. But the strikes continued through the diplomacy, which tells you neither side believes talking is doing the work. When negotiations stall, you introduce a new threatened cost to change the other side's arithmetic. Threatening the mountain does that. It puts on the table the one asset Iran has spent 6 years and enormous resources protecting. And notice a threat you have not executed is often worth more than one you have. Once you strike, the ambiguity is gone and you own the result, whatever it turns out to be. Before you strike, the fear does the work for free. The third answer is the one I find most concerning and I want to flag clearly that this is my opinion rather than reported fact. A publicly named target is a publiclyowned promise. The president said the area would be hit pretty soon, said there was not a thing Iran could do about it, and told the Iranians to be ready. that is now on the record in the American political conversation and in every Iranian intelligence assessment which means that from here not striking becomes a visible choice with visible costs. The statement has created its own pressure to be fulfilled. That is how threats work when they are made at maximum volume in public rather than through channels and tan has responded exactly as you would expect. Iranian state media reported early Wednesday that tan warned that any American attack on Iranian nuclear facilities would be treated as an expansion of the war in the region. I want to unpack that word because it is doing careful work.

[00:24:40]Expansion, not retaliation, not escalation. Expansion geographically.

[00:24:45]Iran is signaling that a strike on nuclear infrastructure moves the war outward to Gulf energy facilities to shipping in a wider radius potentially to the Red Sea where the president said this week that if the Houthus impose a blockade, America will simply have to take care of business. So Iran's deterrent against the mountain strike is not a threat to defend the mountain. It cannot defend the mountain. Its deterrent is a threat to make the rest of the region more expensive. That is the actual bargaining position. Not you can't, but you can. And here's what it will cost you everywhere else. Now, let me give you the honest uncertainty because I would rather be useful than confident. There is a lot here that nobody outside classified spaces knows.

[00:25:24]We do not know whether centrifuges have been moved into Picax Mountain. The president himself acknowledged the possibility this week at a depth that would challenge even the most powerful bombs in the American arsenal.

[00:25:34]Acknowledging a possibility is not confirming a fact. We do not know whether the facility is operational. The assessment from the Institute for Science and International Security based on satellite imagery to date is that it is not yet operational and that construction continues. That is an outside assessment of the surface of a mountain. We do not know its true purpose. The Center for Strategic and International Studies laid out several possibilities for the increased activity and they are meaningfully different from one another. Iran could be doing exactly what it declared, building centrifuges.

[00:26:06]It could be expanding the mission, migrating operations from the facilities that were destroyed, or it could be creating a secret enrichment facility.

[00:26:14]Those three options carry completely different implications. A centrifuge assembly plant is a manufacturing problem. A covert enrichment site is a proliferation emergency. And the reason we cannot distinguish between them is the same reason this whole situation is so dangerous. Nobody has been allowed inside. Which means, and I want to state this as plainly as I can, a strike on Pickaxe Mountain would be a strike on a facility whose contents are genuinely unknown, ordered on the basis of what it might contain with results that could not be verified afterward. That is not a criticism of anyone's decision. It is a description of the epistemic situation and I think it is the single most important thing to understand about this story. So, what should you actually watch for? Let me give you specific concrete indicators rather than vibes.

[00:26:58]First, watch for movement of the aircraft that can carry the heaviest penetrating ordinance. That capability is delivered by a very small number of platforms. Their deployment is one of the few genuinely reliable public signals that a deep target strike is being prepared rather than discussed.

[00:27:14]Second, watch the straight of Hormuz traffic data, not the strike headlines.

[00:27:18]Public ship tracking is the honest scoreboard of this war. If transits recover, pressure is working and diplomacy has room. If transits collapse further, the economic war is intensifying regardless of what anyone says at a podium. Third, watch the Pakistan channel. Mediation efforts running through Islamabad are the live diplomatic track. If those meetings stop happening or if the delegations shrink, that is meaningful before any statement is made. Fourth, watch for any movement on IAEA access. If inspectors are ever discussed in connection with those tunnels in either direction, the entire situation has changed. Access being granted would be the single most deescalatory event possible. Access being formally and permanently refused would remove the last argument against striking. Fifth, watch the Red Sea. The expansion Iran threatened is most likely to appear there first through the Houthis rather than as a direct Iranian action. It is the cheapest way for Thran to make good on a threat without inviting a direct response. And sixth, watch the language. Specifically, watch whether officials keep saying the area near pickaxe mountain or switch to saying pickaxe mountain. That distinction has been present in the phrasing all week. The area near a target is a much easier promise to keep than the target itself. That last one is not trivial. If the strike happens and the official language afterward is about the area, the site, the vicinity, you are being told something. Let me bring this home. For decades, the argument about Iran's nuclear program was conducted in the language of enrichment percentages, breakout timelines, and centrifuge counts. It was an accountant's argument. It assumed a world where you could count the machines. Pickax Mountain ends that argument by burying it. You cannot count what you cannot see. And Iran over six patient years built a place specifically designed so that nobody would ever count again. That is the real achievement of that mountain. And it has almost nothing to do with whether there are centrifuges inside it. Iran has manufactured permanent unfalsifiable doubt in a 100 meters of Zagros rock. And doubt is the cheapest deterrent there is. Which is why the coming decision is so much harder than it looks from outside.

[00:29:24]Strike it and you may not destroy it.

[00:29:26]You certainly cannot prove you destroyed it. And you hand Iran a justification to widen a war that is already costing American lives and tens of billions of dollars. Don't strike it. and a publicly declared red line becomes a publicly declared bluff in front of every adversary and every ally watching how the United States handles a promise.

[00:29:46]There is no clean option. There is only the choice of which cost you would rather carry. And that more than any missile count or strike tally is the actual shape of this war right now.

[00:29:56]Every side has run out of good moves.

[00:29:58]What is left is a contest over who can absorb the worst outcome for longest. So here's what I want from you. If this breakdown was useful, subscribe. This story is moving by the hour and I'm covering it daily with sources named and uncertainty flagged rather than hidden.

[00:30:14]And I want your answer to one question in the comments. Because I genuinely do not know what I think. If a strike on Pickax Mountain cannot be verified afterward, if nobody can ever prove whether it worked, is it still worth doing? Tell me why. I read them. Next, I am breaking down the straight of Hormuz convoy operation itself. 500 million barrels, a covert escort mission, and a claim of control that the shipping data does not entirely support. That one gets uncomfortable.