Trump Is Urged to Act on Iranian Site Feared Impervious to Airstrikes

Over the past year, U.S. airstrikes have crippled Iran’s nuclear program. Several Iranian nuclear facilities lie in ruins. And Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium — “nuclear dust,” as President Trump calls it — is thought to be deeply buried under rubble.

But even after a U.S. bombing raid last June and more than five weeks of attacks on Iran since February, one suspected nuclear site remains untouched. Experts say the underground facility, known as Pickaxe Mountain, is buried so deep that it may lie beyond the reach of America’s most powerful bunker-buster bombs.

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“Pickaxe Mountain is deeper and bigger and more fortified than Fordo,” said Blaise Misztal, the vice president for policy at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America, or JINSA, a Washington research organization. “That may be a place where they are planning to sprint to weapons-grade enrichment.”

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“If there isn’t some full cleansing of Iran’s nuclear program — I mean no enriched uranium, no facilities — I think it would be seen as a huge missed opportunity,” said Michael Makovsky, the president and chief executive of JINSA. Officials in the Trump administration, he added, are “very aware of this issue and they know it has to be addressed.”

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Read the full article in the New York Times.