President Donald Trump has made no secret of the fact that Pickaxe Mountain, an Iranian underground facility, could be a major target should the U.S. military escalate its strikes on the Middle Eastern regime.“Pickaxe is a possible target for a nice big fat shot right near the front door,” he told radio host Hugh Hewitt last week. “And I think that maybe you’ll see that.”​Trump added that the U.S. is closely monitoring Pickaxe Mountain.

​“We see no activity there,” he said. “They’re not doing well with their nuclear situation. Every time we hear about it, we blow it up. So they don’t like talking about it.”​So what exactly is this Iranian site that Trump has suggested targeting?​Located 140 miles south of the Iranian capital of Tehran, Pickaxe Mountain is a massive and heavily fortified storage facility, complete with an underground tunnel system. The site is located near the town of Natanz, and is south of a nuclear complex where two of Iran’s uranium enrichment plants were bombed in strikes on nuclear sites last year.​The Iranian government has said the site is solely intended for producing and assembling advanced centrifuges: machines that rely on uranium enrichment to power nuclear energy.​However, uranium enrichment can also be used for building nuclear weapons.Iranian officials have also blocked International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors from monitoring activities at Pickaxe Mountain, a decision that has escalated geopolitical tensions.IAEA inspectors are part of a United Nations agency tasked with ensuring nuclear materials are not used for war purposes. This includes verifying nuclear facilities match site blueprints without discrepancies.Israeli intelligence said it believes Iran moved thousands of uranium enrichment centrifuges inside Pickaxe Mountain last fall, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal earlier Tuesday.Trump, however, expressed that he is not yet confident about the report’s claim that Iran has moved nuclear centrifuges into Pickaxe Mountain.​“I think that they, they may have, we don’t have it on record,” Trump told reporters after his meeting with the President of Lebanon on Tuesday. “All we do is read the fake news. The news is so wrong so many times. You know, maybe this one they have right. It doesn’t mean anything unless they have the material. You’re talking about the centrifuges; we follow the material. That’s where the action is.”Map showing the location of Pickaxe Mountain in Iran. (Graphic by Grace Hagerman/Washington Examiner)