All eyes on Pickaxe Mountain, Iran’s secretive nuclear site that may not be long for this world

According to experts from the Institute for Science and International Security, an American think tank, and Maiar, a British intelligence analysis firm, the pictures also revealed a boom pump used to deliver concrete.

At another tunnel entrance, meanwhile, rock and soil could be seen scraped back and flattened – “backfilling” tunnel openings helps dampen strikes from the air – and a new reinforced concrete structure had appeared nearby, apparently in an attempt to strengthen the entrances and offer additional protection.

All this heavy machinery and material suggested that the site was on its way to becoming operational.

So far, Pickaxe Mountain has escaped Israeli and American bombs. Yet given that on Monday, Donald Trump threatened that although the United States was “knocking the crap” out of Iran, the “big one” was yet to come, the smart money is on the site becoming a smouldering crater in the near future.

After all, so far, American and Israeli efforts have largely been directed at Iran’s supplies of ballistic missiles and launchers, the crucial metric that will decide this war.

If the stockpiles and launch capabilities are not degraded quickly enough, Iranian strikes will start to take their toll on the home front – the nine deaths in Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem, were a tragic reminder of the human costs of this war – and pressure will mount to draw hostilities to a close.

That was the thinking behind the early stages of the war. The campaign opened with a long-range decapitation strike by Israeli warplanes up to 1,000 miles away from the target: the compound on Pasteur Street in central Tehran.

That was where the residences of the Ayatollah and the president were located, as well as various government departments. On the morning of February 28, as Israeli intelligence had learnt, the Ayatollah was at home and the regime’s highest-ranking officers were gathering for a meeting over the road.

Armed with “black sparrow” missiles, aircraft-mounted ballistic munitions, the Israeli jets took a deceptive and tortuous route out of base before loosing the missiles a great distance from the target.

Thirty of them fell on the Ayatollah’s residence, killing him, while the remainder targeted buildings nearby. Within five minutes, 40 top regime commanders were dead. There followed a second wave of long-distance missile attacks on Iran’s new air defences, which had been installed to replace those destroyed in June. Finally, a squadron of 200 Israeli warplanes swarmed into Iranian airspace, hunting missiles and launchers, with the help of a network of loitering drones.

The early focus on the missiles – the Israelis are concentrating on the west of the country; Americans on the east – is tactically unavoidable. Once they have been degraded sufficiently, however, greater attention will turn to the regime’s military apparatus, as well as the nuclear programme.

For decades, the Iranian regime has been bent on apocalypse. I don’t mean that metaphorically: the Shia “twelver” cult that grips the nation believes that after a global war is triggered by a conflict with Israel, the “Mahdi”, a tenth-century Imam who supposedly turned invisible at the end of his life, will re-materialise and lead the soldiers of Allah to victory.

This is not an abstract belief. The late Ayatollah developed a three-part strategy to trigger a credible apocalypse that would tempt the Mahdi to resume physical form: ballistic missiles, a proxy militia like Hezbollah, and nuclear weapons.

For obvious reasons, of the three, the nuclear weapons have most disturbed the international community. Beginning in earnest after the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, the programme commanded global attention in 2002 with the discovery of previously undeclared enrichment facilities at Natanz.

Since then, Tehran has steadily expanded its nuclear capabilities while insisting, utterly implausibly, that the programme was peaceful. After a series of sanctions and UN Security Council resolutions, in 2015 Barack Obama signed a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Tehran. It imposed time-limited restrictions – including so-called “sunset clauses” – that capped enrichment and enhanced inspections in exchange for sanctions relief, though there were serious concerns about what would happen once the deal expired.

After Israel revealed a cache of Iranian nuclear documents in 2018, first-term Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement and reinstated sweeping sanctions under a policy described as “maximum pressure”. This stifled Iran’s economy and strangled funding to its proxies across the region.

Joe Biden entered office vowing to restore the Obama-era deal. Negotiations continued intermittently, but no agreement was reached, and during this period Iran expanded its enrichment activities well beyond JCPOA limits.

After October 7, the gloves were off. During the Twelve-Day War, American B-2 bombers struck Iran’s nuclear facilities, setting back Iran’s programme significantly. Then after the mass murder of Iranian protesters in January, the White House authorised a campaign of regime change.

Which brings us back to Pickaxe Mountain. There could not be a more apt symbol of the fanaticism, irrationalism and malevolence of the regime. So convinced are these people of the justice of their evil cause and the rewards awaiting them in heaven that they are as responsive to deterrent as zombies. They will never be diverted from their path of death until death comes for them. That is what is happening now; and the facility under Pickaxe Mountain is not long for this world, either.