Donald Trump said again on Friday that the United States may soon strike Pickaxe Mountain, the underground complex near Natanz that is the last significant site linked to Iran's nuclear program still untouched after two wars.
A mountain in the Zagros range in Isfahan province, about 1.5 kilometers south of the Natanz enrichment complex, with a large facility dug into it.
The name is a small accident of translation. The mountain is called Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, and kolang means pickaxe, so foreign analysts began calling the site Pickaxe Mountain. It is not what Iranians call the facility, and Iran has never given it a public name at all.
Because of the rock. Most of the surrounding range is sedimentary, but this mountain is hard, dense granite, which gives anything tunneled beneath it substantial natural protection.
Construction began in the autumn of 2020, months after an explosion destroyed an above-ground advanced centrifuge assembly plant at Natanz in an attack widely attributed to Israel. Iran said at the time that the underground halls would replace it.
The destroyed plant had been built to assemble roughly 6,000 advanced centrifuges a year, a capacity sized for the tens of thousands Iran expected to need as restrictions under the 2015 nuclear deal expired between 2025 and 2030.
Nobody outside Iran knows, which is the heart of the problem.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has never been given access. A double security perimeter, a fence and a wall with a patrol route, rings the entire mountain and joins Natanz's own perimeter. There are two pairs of tunnel entrances, one on the east side and one on the west. Analysts assume they lead to a single facility, but even that is not certain.
Iran has said the site is for producing and assembling advanced centrifuges. The Institute for Science and International Security, which has tracked the construction by satellite for years, judges the space beneath the mountain large enough to hold considerably more: not only an assembly plant but a working enrichment plant capable of producing weapons-grade uranium, and probably enough room for weaponization work such as casting uranium metal and shaping it into weapon components.
Two further claims circulate, neither verified. One is that part of Iran's stockpile of uranium enriched to 60 percent, estimated by the IAEA at around 440 kilograms, has been moved there.
The other, from an Israeli intelligence assessment reported by the Wall Street Journal, is that thousands of centrifuges were moved into the mountain last autumn. Neither Israel nor the United States has published evidence.
The institute's reading of the imagery is that the facility is not yet operational, and that construction continues.
At least 100 meters beneath the mountain, which stands 1,608 meters above sea level.
There is a detail in those measurements worth noticing. The eastern entrances sit about 145 meters below the ridge; the western entrances about 100 meters. That 50-metre difference between the two sets of doors suggests the facility may have more than one level.
Either way it is deeper than Fordow or Natanz, both of which the United States has bombed.
Not the mountain itself. The GBU-57, the largest conventional bunker-buster in the US arsenal, weighs about 13,000 kilograms and is reported to penetrate 18 meters of concrete or 61 meters of earth. Against 100 meters of granite, experts are skeptical.
But a buried facility still has to breathe, and that is where the vulnerability lies. Any working complex needs power, ventilation, heating and cooling, deliveries and people going in and out, and each of those connections surfaces somewhere.
There is a precedent for exactly this. Schematics have been published for two other Iranian tunnel sites built by the Amad nuclear weapons program, Fordow and Shahid Boroujerdi. Both showed ventilation shafts, and in both cases those shafts were directly targeted in air strikes, in June 2025 and March 2026 respectively, because they offered penetrating weapons a way further inside.
No schematics for Pickaxe Mountain have surfaced publicly, but a probable ventilation shaft near the eastern entrances was seen under construction in 2024, fed by a power line that runs above ground before disappearing underground.
The institute's assessment is that an attack would most likely aim at the power supply, the ventilation shafts and the open tunnel mouths, and it notes that as of imagery from July 9 the western pair of entrances remained open.
It also notes that hitting the hardened portals alone would probably deny Iran access only temporarily, adding the mountain to the list of sites that then have to be watched for attempts to dig back in.
Air defenses are not seen as an obstacle. Israel overcame them at Natanz in the opening hours of the June 2025 war.
There is a second possibility, and it has history behind it.
The institute judges that the site, as it now stands, would be more suitable for attack or sabotage by ground forces than from the air. Its model is the 2020 destruction of the Natanz assembly plant, which reportedly involved explosives brought into the building during its construction.
Pickaxe Mountain is still under construction.
That there is nothing there to bomb. Foreign ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said in July that "no nuclear activity is taking place" at the site and called the American threats "a fabricated pretext for aggression, destruction, and sabotage."
Others have been less restrained. Mehdi Mohammadi, an adviser to the parliament speaker, called Pickaxe Mountain "the most heavily fortified nuclear facility in the world" and said a strike would "turn the region into hell."
Iran's joint military command has warned that any attack on nuclear or sensitive sites would widen the war.
July 13. On the Hugh Hewitt show: "We have eyes on it and Pickaxe mountain is a possible target for a nice big fat shot right in the front door. We're watching Pickaxe Mountain very closely. We don't see any activity there." He ended the interview more bluntly: "We're going to take out Pickaxe Mountain. Tell the Iranians to be ready."
July 21. After the Israeli intelligence assessment surfaced: "The new site that they're talking about, they're trying to possibly reconstitute a site, we'll hit that site. Any site where they're even thinking about nuclear, we'll be hitting it very, very powerfully." He said the US would hit the area "pretty soon, and very heavily."
July 28. "I know exactly what's going on at Pickaxe. It's not a big problem. We took out their nuclear sites, and we'll have to take out Pickaxe if we don't make a deal."
September 4. Trump said the US may hit the site very soon, crediting the Space Force for the intelligence. "We know everybody that's moving at Pickaxe, we know everybody that's moving everywhere, all over Iran, and if anything goes bad, we hit them. We hit them hard." He called the conflict a "military conflict" rather than a war, and added: "It's small potatoes for us."
Across two wars, the only recorded strike at the site destroyed a single vehicle on a spoil pile, thought to have been connected to air defense.
One explanation is simply that it is hard to destroy and may not yet contain anything worth destroying.
Iran has spent the interval hardening it further: concrete poured over a western entrance extension, a reinforced structure added at another portal, rock and soil pushed up over an eastern one, and by late April both eastern entrances partially backfilled to block vehicles.
A separate, smaller tunnel complex inside the same perimeter, built in 2007, was sealed shortly after the June 2025 war. What is inside it is unknown.
The other explanation is that Washington wants the option of getting in rather than burying it. Rebeccah Heinrichs of the Hudson Institute has suggested the United States may be preserving the possibility of entering or securing the complex, which would mean a ground operation rather than an air strike. There is no public evidence that one is being planned.
Iranian manufacturers are being squeezed from both ends at once. The steel and plastics they build appliances from have multiplied in price since Israeli and US strikes hit the country's main industrial hubs in March, while the households they sell to have been priced out of the market entirely. Production of refrigerators, televisions and washing machines was already falling by a quarter to more than 40 percent a year before the war began.
What the industry cannot do is pass the costs on, because the arithmetic on the shop floor no longer works for anybody.
The price of a working kitchen
Iran's minimum monthly wage is about 166 million rials, roughly $75. Set against that, the price list on the country's largest online retailer reads as a catalogue of things a working household can no longer buy.
The cheapest mini refrigerator sells for 258 million rials, about $117, a month and a half of that wage. A basic 13-cubic-foot fridge-freezer costs 544 million rials, some $247, more than three months. A mid-sized model runs to 890 million rials, about $405. A washing machine, in the band where most models cluster, costs around 920 million rials, roughly $418, or five and a half months of a minimum wage, and a gas cooker starts at about 360 million rials, $164, rising to 638 million.
Televisions trace the same curve. The cheapest set on the site, a 24-inch model, costs 230 million rials, about $104. A 32-inch television runs to 270 million, and a 43-inch, among the best-selling sizes, to 490 million rials, roughly $223, or nearly three months of wages. A 65-inch set, also a strong seller, costs 1.06 billion rials, about $482, more than six months. At the top of the range, an 85-inch model is listed at 2.9 billion rials, some $1,318, or nearly a year and a half of a minimum wage.
The cheapest dishwasher listed costs 1.34 billion rials, some $609, eight months of wages, which is why dishwashers have moved out of the category of household appliance altogether and into the category of luxury.
At the very top of the market, an imported side-by-side refrigerator is advertised at 4.54 billion rials, about $2,065, or more than two years of a minimum wage.
Iranian media have been documenting what these numbers mean. In May, when conditions were still less severe than they are now, the newspaper Donya-e Eqtesad reported that field observations and consumer complaints showed the breakdown of a refrigerator or washing machine had become an economic and psychological crisis for many families.
Until a few years ago, the paper noted, many households could replace an appliance after saving for several months. Today, buying even a refrigerator, a washing machine or a basic vacuum cleaner has become a distant prospect for a growing number of them.
Repair was the fallback. Repair costs have risen too, and for many families that door is closing as well.
A sector that was already shrinking
The industry serving this market was contracting before the war began.
The Statistical Center of Iran's most recent figures, covering the winter that ran through to March, show refrigerator production down 25 percent year-on-year to 531,000 units. Television production fell 36 percent to 332,000, and washing machine production dropped 42 percent, to 270,000 units.
No comparable production data have been published for other major categories, and the government has released no comprehensive industrial production figures for the past six months.
What the Statistical Center has published is the price index: home appliances in August cost 117 percent more than a year earlier.
Bombed inputs
Then came the strikes. Israeli and US attacks in March hit Iran's two main steel hubs, Mobarakeh and Khuzestan, and its two main petrochemical hubs, Asalouyeh and Mahshahr. Together these complexes account for roughly 50 percent of Iran's steel capacity and 70 percent of its petrochemical capacity.
The effect on manufacturers' input costs has been severe. According to the Iranian Home Appliance Industries Association, the price of the steel used by the industry has risen roughly two and a half times since last summer. Petrochemical feedstocks, including ABS and polypropylene, have gone up three to fourfold.
Authorities have released no detailed figures on the damage or on the operational status of the affected complexes. What is visible is the response: the government has restricted or banned the export of a large share of steel and petrochemical products, while domestic prices for those products have risen sharply.
Protected, and still dependent
The industry these costs are crushing was built behind a wall.
Iran banned home appliance imports in 2016, and in 2021 imposed a particularly strict ban on appliances made by South Korean companies, which had previously held a significant share of the market. The policy shifted the market decisively toward domestic manufacturers, and it has drawn persistent criticism over the quality of what those manufacturers produce.
With foreign competitors largely excluded, domestic firms have faced far less pressure on price. The restrictions have also sustained a thriving trade in smuggled foreign appliances.
What protection has not produced is self-sufficiency. Iran has failed to fully localize production of even its four main categories: refrigerators, washing machines, televisions and dishwashers. According to Hakem Memkan, a member of parliament's economic commission, the country imports around $1.2 billion of components a year for those four categories alone.
So the strategy of substituting domestic production for imports has left manufacturers dependent on imported parts while their domestic input costs multiply.
Nowhere to go
Each of these pressures would be serious alone. Arriving at once, collapsing household purchasing power, multiplied raw material costs, import restrictions, input shortages and continued dependence on foreign components leave the industry with nothing to adjust.
It cannot raise prices without losing more of a market that has already stopped buying. It cannot cut costs without inputs it cannot obtain. And it cannot look abroad, because the wall built to protect it also encloses it.
Most families will simply keep the fridge they have, for as long as it runs.
The format barely varies. A person holds up what they bought and names what it cost. Four eggs and a single sausage, 5 million rials, about $2.30. A soda and a packet of crisps, 3.5 million rials. Three small bags of shopping, 75 million rials, roughly $34, which is close to half a month at Iran's minimum wage of about $75. Then the line, in one version or another: I am very happy, because if I were not, they would execute me. And then they dance.
One man films his phone showing a bank balance of 2 million rials, under a dollar, and dances through the list of what it will not cover: the bounced cheques, the unpaid shop rent, the apartment rent, his wife's clothes.
A veiled woman holds up a few tomatoes, onions and potatoes and explains that she can no longer buy by the kilo, only a handful at a time, "but I am happy, because otherwise they call me a rioter or a traitor." She thanks the authorities and signs off warmly. Another woman does the same with six eggs and a tin of tuna.
Another man dances while captions scroll over him: the dollar at 200,000 tomans, no electricity, deep in debt, and a signed undertaking to the authorities not to engage in politics. The threat varies with the week's official vocabulary: some dancers say they would otherwise be branded a mercenary, a traitor, or a Mossad agent.
It reads, at first, as one more instance of a familiar thing, humor as a pressure valve under repression. That reading is not wrong, but it is not what is new here, and it misses what the videos are actually doing.
The Islamic Republic has a specific charge for describing the country's problems: siah-namai, "painting things black." It is used against journalists, economists and ordinary complainers to mean the deliberate darkening of a reality that is, officials insist, fine. The dance videos answer it precisely. They paint things white, so luridly that the whiteness itself becomes the accusation.
A man delighted by four eggs is not praising the government. He is holding its own demand up to the light.
To see why this is a break rather than a joke, it helps to recall Vaclav Havel's greengrocer, the shopkeeper in communist Czechoslovakia who puts the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" in his window. He does not believe it. What the sign really says, Havel wrote, is: I am obedient and therefore have the right to be left in peace. The system did not need people to believe. It needed each of them to see everyone else pretending, so that pretending felt like the only choice. Its one requirement was silence about what the pretending was for.
The Iranian dancer is Havel's greengrocer saying the quiet part aloud while still holding up the sign. The compliance is performed, the smile is wide, the gratitude is offered. And in the same breath the coercion behind it is named: I am doing this because the alternative is a noose.
Coerced performance works only while the coercion stays deniable. Havel's greengrocer kept the system standing by leaving the reason unsaid. The dancer says the reason into the camera, and the sign in the window stops working.
Follow that to its end and the videos are doing something sharper than mockery. They are exposing a problem the state has made for itself.
When a government criminalizes complaint, it also empties praise of meaning. If unhappiness can be prosecuted, a happy citizen and a frightened one become impossible to tell apart.
The dancers are demonstrating this to the state's face: you can no longer know whether we are content, because you have made discontent a crime, and so our contentment tells you nothing.
This is the deeper significance of a format built entirely from the state's own words. Every accusation the dancers voice, siah-namai, rioter, mercenary, Mossad agent, traitor, is lifted from official language. The videos are assembled from nothing but the vocabulary the government uses to police speech, and turned into an instrument of it.
Linguists distinguish the message from the metamessage: what a statement says, and what it conveys about the relationship between the people speaking. Every one of these videos carries the same metamessage. I cannot tell you the truth, you know I cannot, and I know that you know.
The gap between "I am delighted" and "I am forbidden to say otherwise" is the entire content. Iranians read it without effort. The state pretends to read only the surface.
The videos are the latest move in a shift that has been accelerating, and each stage has done something different to the relationship between a sign and its meaning.
During the January protests, demonstrators in the western town of Abdanan scattered rice into the air, pouring away a staple that had grown scarce and dear. The gesture refused the frame the state wanted to impose on the unrest.
By throwing away the very thing they could barely afford, protesters were saying the anger was never really about the price of rice. The economy had triggered something larger: a rejection of the whole arrangement.
Then came the funerals. After the January massacre, families burying the dead replaced the state's mourning language, the Quranic recitation, the lamentation, the word shahid, "martyr," with another vocabulary entirely: wedding music, folk dance, verses from the Shahnameh, and a new word for their dead, javid-nam, "whose name will endure."
That was an act of authorship. The grief was real, and out of it people built a rival ritual language, deliberately cleansed of the religious symbolism the state relies on.
The price videos are the third move, and they are not the same as the funeral dances, even though both use the body and both use music. The funeral dance builds; it replaces the state's grammar with a sincere one of its own. The price video hollows; it takes the state's grammar and performs it as a corpse. One is about the dead and constructs a new language. The other is about the living and empties an existing one. A society that first refused the state's frame, and then authored its own, is now wearing the state's words as a mask.
It is worth remembering how far this has travelled. Dance is not merely frowned upon in Iran; it is effectively illegal, and the word itself is so freighted that the state, when staging its own approved versions, avoids it and reaches instead for the bloodless euphemism harakat-e mozoun, "rhythmic movements," a coinage that was itself widely mocked when it appeared.
During the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests, teenage girls were detained and pushed into filmed confessions for dancing in a Tehran neighborhood. The same act now circulates in its hundreds, filmed openly by people using their own names and faces, among them veiled women from households where dancing would once have been unthinkable on its own terms, never mind the law's. That is its own measure of how fast the ground is moving.
The trigger, as ever, is money. The rial has been setting records, passing 2,200,000 to the dollar, and on August 31 the judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei called protesters "mercenaries" and promised a firmer hand. But the videos are not really about eggs, any more than the rice was about rice.
They are about a population that has run out of permitted ways to say no, and has started saying yes in a way that unmistakably means it.
The phenomenon has acquired a name, taken from the line the dancers keep repeating: "If I'm not happy, they'll execute me." It is a joke a foreign viewer can laugh at and an Iranian cannot, quite. The Islamic Republic built a machine designed to hear only yes. It is now discovering that yes is what no has learned to sound like.
Iran began backing Arab armed groups in the 1980s, when the Revolutionary Guards trained Hezbollah in Lebanon. The strategy was meant to compensate for Iran’s weak conventional military by projecting power abroad and keeping conflict away from Iranian territory.
That model has suffered major setbacks. The wars triggered after the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack ultimately brought direct attacks on Iran. Hezbollah and Hamas have been badly weakened, Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria has fallen, and Iraq has ordered militias to disarm by October.
The Economist said the network is more likely to fragment than collapse, with some groups becoming more dependent on Tehran, others more autonomous and some looking toward alternative patrons.
Hezbollah represents the first category. Before 2023 it purportedly had more than 100,000 rockets and missiles and an experienced fighting force. Hassan Nasrallah, killed by Israel in 2024, was ideologically close to Iran but retained considerable autonomy.
His successor Naim Qassem has less authority, while Israeli strikes have killed many senior commanders and Lebanon is demanding Hezbollah surrender its remaining arsenal. The Economist said the IRGC sent personnel to Lebanon to exercise more direct control, leaving Hezbollah little choice but to enter another war with Israel in March. Its domestic popularity has also fallen, leaving Iran with an incentive to preserve the group partly because of what its collapse would symbolize.
The Houthis are at the opposite end. Iran’s support transformed them from a local Yemeni insurgency into a force capable of using anti-ship missiles and downing US Reaper drones, but they increasingly act according to their own interests. They are producing more of their own weapons, have developed ties with al-Shabab in Somalia, and have held contacts with Russia and China. Tehran and the Houthis still share enemies, but that does not mean the group takes orders from Iran.
Iraqi Shiite militias fall somewhere in between. Iran remains an ally, but their main patron is now the Iraqi state, which pays more than 200,000 militiamen. Some attacked US bases earlier this year, but larger groups have been reluctant to risk their domestic position. T
he Economist said the IRGC was reported to have created smaller cells in Iraq to attack Persian Gulf states because bigger militias were unwilling to do so.
Hamas has always been an awkward fit in the largely Shiite network. Its new leader Khalil al-Hayya is considered close to Iran, but other officials favor stronger ties with Turkey and Persian Gulf countries.
In March, Hamas urged Tehran to stop attacking Persian Gulf states. Iran is unlikely to abandon Hamas, but its support may become more rhetorical than material.
Tehran also has fewer resources to rebuild the network. The war has caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, the United States is blockading Iranian ports and tightening sanctions, and Assad’s fall has severed Iran’s land route to Lebanon.
The Economist compared the situation, with caveats, to Soviet client states in the 1980s, when Moscow could no longer afford to sustain all its allies. Its conclusion: Iran’s regional network may survive, but increasingly as separate actors rather than a single functioning “axis.”
