US tanker attacks near Iran's shores widen from Jask to its oil heartland

What is it?

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.

Why was it built there?

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.

What is inside?

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.

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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.

How deep is it?

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.

Could American bombs destroy it?

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.

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The other way in

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.

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What does Iran say?

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.

Every time Trump has threatened it

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."

So why has it not been hit?

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.

“The mere threat out there, just the threat of these, is enough to deter traffic, certainly commercial traffic,” Votel told Eye for Iran podcast. .

“It has a huge deterrent effect and it puts the burden on us to keep really, really close watch on this area.”

That creates a paradox in the latest battle over Hormuz: Iran may be turning to rocket-launched mines because more powerful options have been degraded, yet Washington must still behave as though the threat could get through.

The latest US-Iran flare-up began after the US military said it detected Iranian forces on Larak Island preparing to launch rockets carrying sea mines into the Strait. US forces struck the launchers before they could fire.

Iran has traditionally been able to deploy naval mines using small boats, submarines or aircraft. Firing them from rockets would allow Iranian forces to place mines at a distance without exposing boats and crews to US forces watching the waterway.

Why Iran may be turning to rockets

Iranian state television reported on the Fajr-5 multiple-launch rocket system as a weapon for mining Hormuz as early as January 2025, and military analysts have said Iran had been testing the concept.

What has changed is the battlefield around it.

Farzin Nadimi, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute and an expert on Iran’s military and asymmetric warfare, told Eye for Iran that Iran’s conventional military capabilities were significantly degraded during the war, followed by attacks on important IRGC Navy infrastructure.

Nadimi said Iran has lost much of its ability to deploy the larger and more dangerous sea mines it could once put into the water through more traditional means.

“They have little choice but using these smaller, less capable rocket-launched mines,” he said, adding that Iran has also repeatedly tried to strike shipping with anti-ship cruise missiles and one-way attack drones, many of which have been intercepted or jammed.

Iran’s apparent new weapon can therefore be read not simply as evidence of innovation, but as adaptation after military losses.

Less destructive does not mean less disruptive

Rocket-launched mines come with significant compromises. Naval mines capable of badly damaging large ships are heavy. Fitting one into a rocket requires a smaller weapon, limiting its destructive power.

Nadimi said Iran’s rocket-delivered versions are significantly smaller than some older naval mines in its arsenal and consequently less capable of inflicting major damage on large tankers.

But a mine’s effectiveness is psychological as much as it is physical: once mines are believed to be in the water, uncertainty over their location can deter ships from entering.

Votel pointed to the history of mine warfare in the Persian Gulf, including US Navy encounters with Iranian mines during the Tanker War of the 1980s.

Commercial vessels and their insurers therefore do not necessarily need evidence that a mine will hit a ship before taking the threat seriously.

Washington’s burden

That uncertainty shifts part of the burden from Iran to the United States.

The US does not simply have to destroy mines once they enter the water. It has to watch the Strait, Iranian coastal positions and potential launch sites closely enough to prevent Tehran from putting them there in the first place.

“It puts a lot of pressure on us to make sure that we have constant surveillance, not only of the waterways themselves and the main transit routes, but really of the locations where these mines or these weapons can come from,” Votel said.

The latest US strike suggests Washington currently has the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to do that. American forces identified the Iranian launchers and struck them before the mines could be fired.

But Iran does not necessarily have to defeat that surveillance system to impose a cost. Simply retaining the capability forces the US to keep watching and commercial operators to trust that nothing has slipped through.

For Tehran, that creates an asymmetric advantage even after significant military losses: the US must repeatedly demonstrate that Hormuz is safe, while Iran only has to preserve doubt that it might not be.

Degradation or restraint?

There is an important caveat. The smaller scale of Iran’s recent attacks does not necessarily mean Tehran is incapable of doing more.

Nadimi said there are signs Iran is deliberately exercising restraint with some weapons, particularly ballistic missiles, to avoid triggering a larger escalation involving both the United States and Israel.

The rocket-launched mine claim itself also remains contested. Some maritime specialists have questioned whether Iran has operationalized the system as the US describes, while others consider it technically plausible.

Even if the system is operational, however, Iran would not need to mine the Strait extensively for it to have an effect. All Tehran needs is for military planners, ship operators and insurers to believe there is a credible possibility that it could get some mines into the water.

Votel sees that as part of a broader Iranian strategy: “Their intention is to make this painful for us and for those that are supporting the United States.”

Iran may now have fewer options for mining Hormuz than it once did. But if the threat of a mine is enough to make a ship hesitate—and enough to make the US military watch Iran’s coastline around the clock—Tehran can still impose a cost without a mine ever hitting a vessel.

Iranian officials and state media have long portrayed control of the strategic waterway as a powerful bargaining tool, and many continue to do so.

But a warning from a commentator close to parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf that Washington was trying to erode that advantage suggested the consensus may not be as solid as before.

“Targeting Iranian ships by the US, in response to Iran confronting any vessel that does not accept the route and arrangements determined by Iran for passing through the strait, is Trump’s dangerous method of reducing Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz,” Ali Gholhaki wrote on X on Thursday.

Without a new initiative from Tehran, he said, the United States could gradually “discredit the Strait card for Iran,” urging authorities to “devise a new plan.”

A card to play, not hold

Ghalibaf himself had hinted at this earlier.

“We should not turn the Strait of Hormuz to its opposite,” he said in a televised interview in June. “The Strait of Hormuz is valuable when traffic through it increases day by day, not when it decreases.”

The argument is not that Hormuz has no value, but that its greatest value may lie in the threat of disruption or its use as a short-term shock rather than prolonged restrictions that also damage Iran.

Journalist Arash Hashemi questioned whether that point had already been reached.

“Hasn’t the Strait card been without a payoff for some time? When we close the strait, they impose a blockade; and our own exports and imports decrease as a result, the value of our national currency falls, and everything else follows,” he wrote. “Does the Strait card still have any bargaining value?”

Reformist journalist Mohammad Sohofi similarly argued that closing the strait could work as a short-term shock to create leverage for a deal.

“Closing the Strait of Hormuz had value as a powerful blow and shock to the market, to shape an equation and conduct a deal,” he wrote, “but it was obvious from the beginning that continuing to use this card would turn it against itself.”

The concern is that the longer restrictions persist, the more Iran suffers from reduced trade while the United States and other countries have time to develop countermeasures.

Hardliners push back

Hardliners reject the suggestion that Iran is burning through its leverage, arguing that such claims risk weakening Tehran’s position.

“One of the most ridiculous and baseless things I have heard these days is that the Strait of Hormuz card will soon lose its value,” hardline commentator Alireza Taghavinia wrote on X.

“These are the same people who once claimed that Iran could never close it,” he added. “Some people would do better to remain silent and not break the morale of the people.”

The disagreement therefore turns less on whether Hormuz can impose costs than on whether Iran can sustain those costs long enough to extract political concessions without inflicting comparable damage on itself.

Searching for another weapon

The debate has gained another dimension from an unlikely source.

Kayhan editor Hossein Shariatmadari, who has advocated closing Hormuz to US, Israeli and allied shipping for years, has now proposed that Iran’s military and the Revolutionary Guards disrupt or sever international fiber-optic cables beneath the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz.

Shariatmadari argued that such action could be “many times more frightening and dangerous for the enemy” than keeping the strait closed.

Critics seized on the proposal as evidence that even proponents of maximum pressure were searching for additional leverage.

Journalist Hassan Abbasi warned that disrupting the cables would not hurt Iran’s adversaries alone, because the country’s own trade, banking, communications and digital economy depend on the same infrastructure.

That is increasingly the question running through the debate in Tehran: not whether Iran can impose costs through Hormuz, but how long it can do so before the weapon begins imposing comparable costs on Iran itself.

Reports on Friday, including by the Financial Times, indicated that mediators were working to establish a framework for possible fresh talks.

Iranian and Omani foreign ministers have already discussed creating a temporary shipping corridor as a step toward a more permanent arrangement.

Such a deal offers something increasingly scarce after six months of war: a face-saving compromise. Tehran could present it as recognition of its role in securing the strait, while Washington could claim it had restored freedom of navigation.

The possibility comes after months of strikes, economic pressure and intermittent diplomacy have failed to break the deadlock.

Iran’s restrictions on maritime traffic through Hormuz have meanwhile turned the vital energy corridor into one of Tehran’s most important bargaining chips.

A route back to talks

The moderate Fararu website quoted Andreas Krieg, a Middle East security expert at King’s College London, as describing an agreement over Hormuz as the most plausible route from direct confrontation toward broader negotiations.

A limited shipping agreement would not resolve disputes over Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions or regional security. But it could provide a confidence-building measure without requiring either side to publicly concede defeat.

The alternative paths being discussed in Iranian media are considerably darker.

Economic escalation

One is an intensification of the economic confrontation already underway.

Washington has shifted increasingly toward aggressive economic pressure through secondary sanctions under “Operation Economic Exclusion,” alongside its maritime blockade and the threat of further strikes.

Iran’s counter-strategy is to make that pressure costly for others. By restricting shipping and threatening regional energy infrastructure and trade routes, Tehran can force Persian Gulf states and other international actors to bear some of the economic consequences.

The US strategy has its own limitation: China. Enforcing secondary sanctions against major Chinese financial institutions would carry considerably greater economic and geopolitical risks than targeting smaller intermediaries.

Back to military action

Another possibility is renewed large-scale military confrontation.

A collapse in diplomacy, failure of economic pressure or a high-casualty Iranian attack on US forces could trigger further American and Israeli strikes, followed by Iranian retaliation.

Recent attacks on southern Iran have already shown how quickly economic and maritime confrontation can return to the battlefield.

Civilian casualties, including those from a strike on a residential building hosting a wedding, have further raised the costs of escalation, although responsibility for that attack remains under investigation.

A war without an end

Perhaps the bleakest scenario is also the least dramatic: neither diplomacy nor escalation produces a breakthrough.

Instead, the conflict settles into prolonged attrition involving intermittent strikes, maritime disruption, cyber operations, sanctions, covert economic measures and nuclear pressure.

That prospect helps explain the significance of the tentative diplomacy around Hormuz.

The strait has become one of Iran’s most powerful instruments of pressure, imposing costs far beyond the battlefield. Yet that same leverage may now provide the basis for an agreement neither side has to describe as capitulation.

After six months in which war, economic pressure and diplomacy have all failed to break the deadlock, the waterway at the center of the confrontation may also offer the narrowest route out of it.

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.

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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.”