On Sunday night, Tucker Carlson told his followers on X that the Trump administration may be days away from using a nuclear weapon on Iran. The target, he wrote, is Pickaxe Mountain, a tunnel complex in central Iran, and the decision could come by 7th November. Carlson offered no independently verifiable evidence, and neither Washington nor Jerusalem has confirmed that a nuclear strike is under consideration.1

It would be easy to dismiss the post as another salvo from a commentator who has broken with the president over this war. But the target is not invented. Speaking at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, Trump said the United States still had one or two sites to deal with, named Pickaxe Mountain, and claimed the job could be done in ten minutes.2 A fortnight earlier, he told Newsmax he would not use a nuclear weapon against Iran.3

Both statements can stand at once, and that is the point. The useful question is not whether Carlson's sources are right. It is why this particular mountain keeps dragging the debate towards a weapon nobody has used in war since 1945.

The site the bombers skipped

Pickaxe Mountain, known in Farsi as Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, sits about 220 kilometres south of Tehran and two kilometres from the Natanz enrichment complex. Construction began in earnest in 2020, after Iran blamed sabotage for an explosion at Natanz, and Trump has been threatening it publicly since at least July, when he told a radio host the US would "take out" the site.4

What is inside is genuinely unclear. A satellite study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) found more road activity at the site in 2026 than at any point in its history, along with hardened tunnel entrances and paved internal roads. The same study could neither confirm nor rule out Israeli claims that centrifuges have been moved in, and judged the complex probably not yet capable of enrichment.5

It also escaped the June 2025 strikes on Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has never been allowed to inspect it.6 So the one major site left standing is also the one the world knows least about.

Too deep, too hard

The military problem is depth. Analysts at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies estimated in 2023 that the facility was being built between 80 and 100 metres underground, and digging has continued since. The GBU-57, America's heaviest conventional bunker-buster, is rated to drive through at least 60 metres of earth before detonating, which falls short of those estimates.7 CSIS puts parts of Pickaxe roughly 20 metres deeper than Fordow, the hardest target hit in 2025.8

The rock matters as much as the depth. Fordow sits under sedimentary limestone. Pickaxe is cut into granite, which has far higher compressive strength and absorbs the shock of a conventional blast more effectively.9 Fordow also had a weakness the US exploited: its ventilation shafts. CSIS doubts Iran has repeated that mistake, and believes destroying Pickaxe outright would probably require ground troops.10

None of this proves a conventional strike would fail. Depth estimates from satellite imagery are uncertain, and bombs can seal entrances and cut power without reaching the halls themselves. But it does mean that a promise to "take out" the mountain is a promise conventional airpower may not be able to keep.

How a target shapes a decision

This is where geology becomes politics. When a leader commits publicly to destroying something, the commitment acquires a logic of its own. Thomas Schelling, the Cold War strategist, called this the art of commitment: a threat is credible precisely because backing down would be costly. The trouble comes when the threat outruns the means of carrying it out.

Trump has repeatedly said Pickaxe will be taken out, while also saying he would never use a nuclear weapon in Iran. Several experts told the Daily Caller that conventional ordnance is unlikely to destroy the site decisively.11 That leaves a gap between what has been promised and what can be delivered, and gaps like that tend to be closed in one of three ways.

The first is to lower the bar, redefining success as disabling the site rather than destroying it. The second is to change the method. Officials have reportedly discussed special forces raids and other unconventional options, and some analysts argue a ground component may be unavoidable.12 The third is to raise the yield. Each step up that ladder carries more risk than the one before, and the third is the one Carlson claims is being pushed.

The point is not that Washington has chosen the third path. It is that an unreachable target makes the third path a live topic of conversation in a way it would not otherwise be. The pressure comes from the mountain as much as from any ally.

A thinning taboo

The ladder matters more because the top rung looks lower than it did a year ago. The political scientist Nina Tannenwald has argued that nuclear restraint since 1945 rests less on deterrence than on a taboo, a shared sense that these weapons are simply not used. Taboos hold only as long as people treat them as unthinkable.

Several recent shifts push the other way. The administration's January 2026 National Defense Strategy gave nuclear weapons an explicit role in "escalation management", language absent from earlier strategy documents.13 Since August, the Pentagon has been drafting a strategy, broadly confirmed by Under Secretary Elbridge Colby, that gives more weight to shorter-range, lower-yield tactical weapons. With New START expired in February, no treaty now caps American or Russian deployed warheads.14 Critics at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists warn the approach blurs the line between conventional and nuclear war.15

That strategy is framed around Russia and China, not Iran, and supporters argue it simply catches up with rivals. But in April, the Union of Concerned Scientists was already warning that the president's threats against Iran alluded to nuclear first use.16 Carlson's claim that doctrine was rewritten "since February" compresses the timeline, but the direction of travel he describes is real.

The case against the alarm

There are good reasons to doubt that a nuclear strike is imminent. The White House says it does not comment on military plans, Secretary of State Marco Rubio says no decision has been made, and even some of Trump's own supporters have called Carlson's claim a hoax.17 The president's on-record position remains that he would not go nuclear.

There is also a strategic argument against it that does not depend on morality. CSIS's Joseph Rodgers thinks even the heaviest conventional bombs would likely only disable Pickaxe, but he also notes that Iran already holds around 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 per cent.18 Destroying a mountain, by any means, does not destroy material that may already be stored elsewhere. In Rodgers's view the air campaign has reached its limits, and only a negotiated deal with intrusive inspections can close the gap. He also points out that the 2015 nuclear deal took 18 months of intensive talks.19

Diplomacy has not stopped. Vice President JD Vance wrote in October to Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, offering talks, and Qatari mediators returned to Tehran on Friday.20 If those channels hold, the mountain may never need to be tested at all.

Two elections, one week

The mountain explains why the most dangerous option stays on the table. The calendar explains why this particular week feels so tense, because two elections are about to collide.

The first is in America. On 8th October, Trump pledged not to attack Iran at any point before Tuesday's midterms.21 The war has been a liability at home. In an April Reuters/Ipsos poll, 77 per cent of registered voters said Trump bore at least a fair amount of responsibility for rising petrol prices, and 58 per cent said they were less likely to back candidates who supported his approach to Iran.22 The pledge looks less like a change of policy than a pause timed to the ballot box. Axios reports that Trump is running two tracks at once, pursuing talks while preparing for a possible return to major combat after the vote, just as he did before the strikes of June 2025 and February 2026.23 Other outlets, relaying Axios, have suggested a bad night for Republicans could make him more willing to strike, not less.24 Once the votes are counted, the domestic brake comes off.

The second is in Israel. The 27th October election left Netanyahu's bloc on 53 seats, down from 64 in 2022, with Gadi Eisenkot's opposition on 48 and neither side able to reach 61. Likud has responded by claiming Arab-led parties "stole" the result, and whoever receives the mandate will have 28 days, extendable by 14, to build a government.25 President Isaac Herzog begins consultations on Wednesday, and Naftali Bennett's party, the Joint List and Ra'am are all expected to recommend Eisenkot.26

This is the kernel of truth in Carlson's account. Netanyahu has made Iran central to his pitch for another term, promising to "finish the job", though analysts argue the most consequential decision will be made in Washington, not Jerusalem.27 Political scientists call this a diversionary incentive, the idea that leaders under pressure at home look for confrontation abroad. The evidence for the theory is mixed, and it would be a stretch to read Netanyahu purely through that lens, since he has argued for confronting Iran's nuclear programme for three decades. But his weakness and the timing of his push are hard to separate.

Put the two calendars together and the coming days look different. Wednesday brings both the midterm results and the start of Herzog's consultations, and Carlson's supposed deadline falls on Saturday. The geology has not changed, but the politics around it may be about to.

The mountain will still be there

Carlson may be wrong about this week. His sources are anonymous, his deadline is unverifiable, and his warnings about world war are advocacy rather than analysis. If 7th November passes quietly, many will treat the whole episode as a false alarm.

That would miss what is genuinely worrying. A president has publicly committed to destroying a site that his conventional arsenal may not be able to destroy. His own defence establishment is making smaller nuclear weapons more central to its thinking, and no treaty now limits them. Put those together and the question of nuclear use moves, quietly, from the unthinkable to the merely undesirable.

Taboos rarely break in a single dramatic moment. They wear down, one reasonable-sounding option paper at a time. Whatever happens this week, Pickaxe Mountain will still be standing, still deep, and still a reason for the most dangerous option to stay on the table. The way out is the one Rodgers points to: a deal that gets inspectors inside the mountain, so no one has to argue about how to destroy it.

Footnotes

  1. Ynetnews, Tucker Carlson: Netanyahu ‘cornered and desperate,’ pushing Trump for Iran attack (opens in a new tab), 2nd November 2026.

  2. InvestingLive, Tucker Carlson claims Trump weighing nuclear strike on Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain (opens in a new tab), 2nd November 2026.

  3. Al Jazeera, Trump rules out using a nuclear bomb on Iran: Why that matters (opens in a new tab), 16th October 2026.

  4. Reuters via New Straits Times, What is Pickaxe Mountain, the Iranian nuclear-linked site threatened by Trump? (opens in a new tab), 16th July 2026.

  5. Iran International, Satellite imagery shows surge in construction at Pickaxe Mountain, CSIS (opens in a new tab), 10th September 2026.

  6. Eurasia Review, Is Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain beyond the reach of US bunker-busters? (opens in a new tab), 20th September 2026.

  7. AP via NBC Philadelphia, What to know about Pickaxe Mountain, Iran’s nuclear site Trump is threatening to strike (opens in a new tab), 22nd July 2026.

  8. KUTV, Satellite images show surge in construction work at Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain (opens in a new tab), 9th September 2026.

  9. The New Arab, What is Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain and why does Trump want to bomb it? (opens in a new tab), 14th July 2026.

  10. KMPH, Satellite images show surge in construction work at Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain (opens in a new tab), 9th September 2026.

  11. Daily Caller, Trump eyes Iranian target that would probably take a nuke to totally destroy (opens in a new tab), 10th September 2026.

  12. Daily Wire, What is Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain, and why is Trump talking about it? (opens in a new tab), 15th July 2026.

  13. CSIS, Trump’s new nuclear architecture for modernization and arms control (opens in a new tab), 13th March 2026.

  14. The Hill, The Pentagon’s new nuclear doctrine needs congressional guardrails (opens in a new tab), 29th August 2026.

  15. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Pentagon’s secret plan: Reviving Cold War doctrines to lower the threshold for nuclear war (opens in a new tab), 11th September 2026.

  16. Union of Concerned Scientists, Congress must restrain the Trump administration from nuclear weapons first use (opens in a new tab), 7th April 2026.

  17. IBTimes UK, Netanyahu calls Trump daily to pressure him to nuke Iran; decision could come by November 7, Tucker Carlson claims (opens in a new tab), 2nd November 2026.

  18. KATV, Satellite images show surge in construction work at Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain (opens in a new tab), 9th September 2026.

  19. WJLA, Satellite images show surge in construction work at Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain (opens in a new tab), 9th September 2026.

  20. Iran International, Vance offers to meet Iran’s Rezaei for peace talks as Qatar renews mediation efforts (opens in a new tab), 30th October 2026.

  21. Colorado Politics, Trump pledges not to attack Iran before midterm elections (opens in a new tab), 8th October 2026.

  22. Reuters via Aaj English, Americans blame Trump for gas price surge in midterm election year (opens in a new tab), 24th April 2026.

  23. Axios, Trump has frank call with Netanyahu about next move in Iran war (opens in a new tab), 1st November 2026.

  24. UNN, Netanyahu urged Trump to strike Iran after the U.S. elections, Axios (opens in a new tab), 1st November 2026.

  25. CNBC, Israel faces weeks of coalition haggling as Netanyahu’s party claims election ‘stolen’ (opens in a new tab), 30th October 2026.

  26. Jerusalem Post, Bennett to recommend Eisenkot as prime minister, B’Yachad party says ahead of meeting with Herzog (opens in a new tab), 1st November 2026.

  27. Iran International, Netanyahu or not, the next move on Iran may be Trump’s (opens in a new tab), 1st November 2026.