The UN nuclear watchdog’s 35-nation Board of Governors voted Wednesday to report Iran to the Security Council over breaches of its nuclear non-proliferation obligations, escalating a two-decade nuclear dispute amid an ongoing war and renewed Western pressure on Tehran.
The resolution was spearheaded by the United States and the E3 (Britain, France and Germany) after the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran had failed to provide inspectors with access to nuclear facilities and information needed to account for its enriched uranium stocks.
It is the first time Iran has been reported to the Security Council by the IAEA since 2006, when an escalating confrontation over Tehran’s nuclear activities moved from the Vienna-based watchdog to the UN body and eventually led to a series of Security Council sanctions.
The latest referral comes in radically different circumstances. Iranian nuclear facilities have been heavily damaged in US and Israeli strikes, and inspectors have not returned to the affected sites since the attacks began in June 2025.
The IAEA says it has consequently lost track of Iran’s stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% purity, which before the strikes stood at 440.9 kilograms.
Iran maintains that its nuclear program is peaceful and has argued that the US and Israeli attacks themselves made continued inspections impossible.
Tehran’s mission to international organizations in Vienna said on X that the resolution would facilitate the “further erosion and ultimate collapse of the proliferation regime as a whole,” intensifying Tehran’s criticism of the IAEA as politically driven.
China and Russia joined Iran ahead of Wednesday’s vote in opposing the Western-backed resolution, saying the referral “lacks a legal basis” and would aggravate the crisis rather than aid diplomacy.
The three countries described the finding of Iranian non-compliance as “politically motivated and far-fetched” and argued that US and Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities were the primary reason Tehran had subsequently denied the IAEA access.
The vote adds another layer of diplomatic pressure as Iran faces an intensifying war with the United States and widening economic sanctions.
Britain this week unveiled tougher restrictions targeting Iran’s access to its financial system, trade and shipping, following the reimposition of UN sanctions under the snapback mechanism initiated last year by Britain, France and Germany.
What happens at the Security Council is less certain. Russia and China both hold vetoes, making substantive action against Iran difficult even as the referral returns the nuclear dispute to the UN body for the first time in two decades.
CSIS examined six years of satellite imagery of Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La, commonly known as Pickaxe Mountain, an underground complex about two kilometers south of Natanz and roughly 225 kilometers south of Tehran.
The analysis found more road activity at the site in 2026 than at any previous point in its history and what researchers described as a “clear surge in construction activity.”
Recent work included raising and hardening tunnel entrances, paving internal roads, reinforcing access areas and removing excavated soil, according to images taken in July and August.
The researchers said the activity indicated that work had shifted from excavation toward probable construction inside the complex, while reinforcement of its exterior continued.
CSIS outlined three possible purposes for Pickaxe Mountain: a centrifuge assembly facility, a uranium enrichment plant or a protected location for other nuclear-related work, including uranium metal conversion.
The report said publicly available evidence was insufficient to determine what Iran intended to place inside the complex. It could neither confirm nor disprove reports that Tehran had moved centrifuges or centrifuge components there.
Continuous construction, the absence of increased internal security and the lack of vehicles or equipment unrelated to building work suggested the site was “not yet capable of enrichment work,” if enrichment was its intended purpose, the analysts said.
CSIS also said the complex would be extremely difficult to destroy using conventional weapons because it is buried deep inside a granite mountain.
Open-source estimates place parts of the facility between 80 and 100 meters underground, but the report cautioned that satellite imagery could not reliably establish its depth or internal design.
The GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, the heaviest conventional bunker-busting bomb in the US arsenal, may not be able to reach and destroy the complex, according to the analysis.
A military operation could instead seek to collapse the tunnel entrances, potentially degrading or temporarily disabling the facility without destroying it.
CSIS concluded that military strikes might delay work at the facility but would not offer a sustainable solution to concerns about Iran’s nuclear program, arguing that any lasting resolution would require a verifiable diplomatic agreement.
The IAEA has requested information about Pickaxe Mountain and access to the site, but Iran has not responded, the report said.
Iran began building the facility in 2020 after an aboveground centrifuge assembly workshop at Natanz was damaged in suspected Israeli sabotage. Iranian nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi said at the time that a replacement centrifuge assembly facility would be built underground near Natanz.
US President Donald Trump said on September 4 that Washington may strike Pickaxe Mountain “very soon,” reiterating that Iran would not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.
The Pentagon has made preparations this year to test classified capabilities against deeply buried targets, CNN reported on Wednesday, citing federal contracting records and people familiar with the effort.
Days before the war began on February 28, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency approved an emergency $1.2 million contract to repair a specialized underground testing facility at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The work was intended to prepare the site for a live-fire test against rapidly emerging threats, according to the records.
Three sources told CNN that the planned test was connected to the Iran war and efforts to develop a way to strike Iran’s deepest underground facilities, potentially by simulating attacks on specific nuclear sites.
Satellite imagery reviewed by CNN showed excavation and vehicle activity at the White Sands site beginning in mid-February and continuing into March. CNN said it could not independently verify whether the test occurred or determine its purpose. The Pentagon and the contractor did not provide comment.
The US military also maintains operational plans for striking Pickaxe Mountain, and the facility was included in a target package considered earlier this summer, a source familiar with the matter told CNN. The plan involved some of the largest bombs in the US arsenal, though it remained unclear whether they could penetrate deeply enough to destroy the facility.
Another source told CNN that Defense Department officials recently held a “planning sprint” on options for attacking deeply buried sites. The US Air Force is separately developing a next-generation penetrator to replace its existing bunker-busting bomb, with initial prototype work commissioned in September 2025.
Minister of State Stephen Doughty said the government was introducing legislation to tighten financial and trade restrictions, widen powers to sanction ships linked to Iran and bar Iranian aircraft from landing in the UK unless exemptions apply.
“Today we are laying legislation which will tackle Iranian nuclear activity and other hostile Iranian activity,” Doughty said in a written statement to parliament.
Focus on nuclear program
Doughty said Iran had expanded its nuclear program in ways that had no credible civilian justification and pointed to its stockpile of more than 400 kg of uranium enriched to 60%.
“Iran is the only country without nuclear weapons to enrich uranium to this level,” he said.
Britain restored UN sanctions on Iran in October 2025 after the snapback mechanism was triggered and also designated 71 people and entities linked to Iran's nuclear program, including financial institutions and energy companies.
Wider trade and financial restrictions
The new rules expand restrictions on goods, technology and services tied to sectors including energy, software, metals and gold, as well as shipping, insurance and banking.
They also ban exports of additional goods and technology that Britain says could support Iran's conventional weapons and nuclear capabilities.
Doughty said the financial measures would “further reduce the Government of Iran’s ability to access the UK financial system and raise funds in support of its nuclear programme.”
Shipping and aviation targeted
Britain will also gain broader powers to sanction ships that it says enable or facilitate Iran's nuclear program or other destabilizing activity.
Iranian aircraft will be barred from landing in the UK unless exemptions apply, following Britain's termination of bilateral air service arrangements with Iran in 2024.
The legislation includes exemptions to allow continued operations at the Shah Deniz gas field in Azerbaijan, which supplies energy to European countries.
Doughty said Britain remained committed to diplomacy, saying a negotiated outcome was “the only long-term solution” to the dispute over Iran's nuclear program.
Naser Mansoursharifloo, an Iranian citizen, applied for the visa in January 2024. About six weeks later, government records marked his case as “approved pending info from partners,” but no final decision followed for more than two years.
By the time the case reached a court hearing in August, the application had spent about 911 days in security screening, far longer than government processing estimates for Iranian visitor visas during the period.
Mansoursharifloo holds a doctorate in mechanical engineering and previously worked as a project manager at the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant. He also served as head of engineering at Islamic Azad University in central Tehran, according to the court.
The court said the government had not provided enough evidence to explain why the screening had taken so long. It ordered authorities to make a decision within 60 days of the September 1 ruling.
The order does not require Canada to approve Mansoursharifloo’s visa and the court did not find that he was inadmissible. It only requires the government to make a decision.
Canada steps up action against Iranian officials
The case comes amid a broader push by Canada to keep out or remove former senior officials of the Islamic Republic, particularly people whose past government roles could make them inadmissible under Canadian law.
Ottawa moved in 2022 to bar senior Iranian government officials from entering or remaining in Canada after the Islamic Republic’s crackdown on nationwide anti-establishment protests.
Canada has since pursued a number of cases involving former Iranian officials already in the country, while immigration authorities have increased scrutiny of applicants with backgrounds in Iranian government institutions.
Canada also listed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist entity in 2024, adding another layer to its increasingly confrontational approach toward people and institutions tied to the Islamic Republic.
Former officials face deportation cases
In one recent case, Canadian authorities are seeking to deport Abbas Omidi, a former senior official in Iran’s Ministry of Industry, Mines and Trade who lives in Toronto.
Canadian government documents reported by Global News said Omidi had played a significant role in Iran’s mining sector and that revenue generated by the sector helped support the Iranian government, its military and the IRGC.
Omidi acknowledged during his deportation proceedings that he had served as a deputy director general in the ministry but said his position was mainly technical.
The Canada Border Services Agency is seeking his removal on the grounds that he served as a senior Iranian government official.
Canada has also pursued other former officials under measures introduced after 2022, including people connected to Iranian state institutions and security bodies.
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.
