A hidden fortress under construction in Iran — known as “Pickaxe Mountain” — may potentially be housing any uranium stockpiles that Tehran managed to smuggle out before the US bombed its nuclear sites.

The deeply buried installation, which is just minutes from the Natanz nuclear facility — one of the three sites struck over the weekend — has been quietly reinforced in recent years.

Multiple reports have suggested that Pickaxe could be the perfect hiding place for uranium — as speculation mounted that Iran may have been able to remove its cache before the attacks unfolded over the weekend.

4 An overhead view of the Natanz nuclear facility. Tam Nguyen / NYpost Design

Open-source satellite images taken Thursday and Friday showed lines of cargo-style trucks outside Fordow, arousing suspicion that the theocratic regime could have moved its stockpile of enriched uranium.

Almost 900 pounds of uranium enriched to 60% purity has been unaccounted for since the Israeli airstrikes began on June 13.

Meanwhile, Iran has been cagey about the Pickaxe Mountain site after satellite imagery emerged earlier this year showing a new deeply buried tunnel and security perimeter close to the existing Natanz site.

4 A graphic of the Natanz nuclear facility. Tam Nguyen / NYPost Design

The director general of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency asked Tehran in April about what was going on there — but got a blunt response.

“Since it is obvious it is in a place where numerous and important activities related to the program are taking place, we’re asking them, what is this for? They are telling us, it’s none of your business,” Rafael Grossi, the director general, said at the time.

He added that it “cannot be excluded” that the tunnels would store undeclared material, but said he didn’t want to speculate on intentions.

4 Images released by US defense contractor Maxar Technologies showed more than a dozen trucks lined up outside Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility just days before the US carried out its large-scale airstrikes. Satellite image ©2025 Maxar Technologies/AFP via Getty Images

“I’ve been raising this issue repeatedly, and I will continue to do so,” Grossi said.

It wasn’t immediately clear if Pickaxe suffered any damage during the latest strikes that targeted Natanz, as well as the Fordow and Isfahan nuclear facilities.

President Trump, for his part, has insisted Iran wouldn’t have been able to remove any uranium being enriched at the sites before the attacks.

4 The deeply buried installation is just minutes from the Natanz nuclear facility. DigitalGlobe/Getty Images

“They didn’t have a chance to get anything out because we acted fast,” Trump said Wednesday.

“It would have taken two weeks, maybe. But it’s very hard to remove that kind of material, very hard and very dangerous for them to remove it.”

Trump also has insisted his attacks “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, and the White House has dismissed a leaked preliminary intelligence assessment suggesting Tehran could salvage it within months.

The dust has settled over Fordow, Iran’s remote mountain nuclear facility, and two other locations the United States says it “obliterated” over the weekend in a dramatic escalation of its efforts to hamstring Tehran’s nuclear program.

That program, to date, has yielded just over 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium, what is considered “near” to the grade of refined uranium that can be put into a bomb.

So where is Iran’s highly enriched uranium?

“I think the safest way of describing it is that Iran knows where it is, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the public doesn’t, and if the [Americans/Israelis] do, they’re not telling,” said Richard Nephew, who served as the Iran director for the National Security Council under President Barack Obama.

“There is a chance somewhere in the first days of the war, they could have moved it, they could have taken some of it to another place,” said Oren Setter, a retired Israeli brigadier general and a leading expert on Iran, “but between the US and Israel and other intelligence communities, there’s a good chance it would have been discovered.”

The Iranians “probably thought it was safe in the tunnels,” he said.

In the wake of the June 22 bombing run — and the nine days of Israeli strikes that preceded it — intelligence analysts, international inspectors, and nuclear experts have scrambled to figure out how badly Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been damaged.

US President Donald Trump repeated his earlier insistence that the US bombs inflicted massive damage on the Fordow in particular.

“The site is obliterated, and we think everything nuclear is down there, they didn’t take it out,” he said on June 25. “We hit Iran so hard and so fast they didn’t have time to move their enriched material. It’s very hard to move, it’s very heavy. We believe it’s buried under granite, concrete, and steel.”

So far, that’s not clear.

Breakout Time

In the wider discussion about how decisive the US strike was, the question of where the uranium is is key.

Iran, which insists its program is peaceful or civilian in nature, is estimated to have about 8,400 kilograms of enriched uranium in all, as of May. The vast majority of it has been enriched to low levels, suitable for power plants. That’s allowed under international law.

But according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, known as the IAEA, the country also has 408 kilograms of highly enriched uranium – refined to around 60 percent.

Most of that is believed to have been stored at the Isfahan Nuclear Technology and Research Center, located 450 kilometers south of Tehran. Isfahan was hit by Tomahawk cruise missiles fired by a US submarine. B-2 Stealth bombers, meanwhile, circled to globe to drop so-called “bunker buster” bombs at Natanz and Fordow, a sprawling enrichment facility buried deep in a mountain.

A preliminary assessment of the damage, by the US Defense Intelligence Agency, said an unknown amount of the highly enriched uranium, or HEU, was moved out of Fordow prior to the bombing. It could have been moved to a third site that the Iranians have reportedly told IAEA about ahead of time, the Pentagon agency found.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tried to emphasize that assessment by the DIA was merely preliminary and inconclusive. CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the agency’s own assessment contradicts the DIA findings, and that Iran’s nuclear program “has been severely damaged.”

Iran has said little about the issue.

IAEA director Rafael Grossi said the agency received a letter on June 13 from Iran’s top diplomat saying Tehran will “adopt special measures to protect our nuclear equipment and materials.” No details of the measures were given.

Outside experts are circumspect.

“With residual stocks of 60 percent and hidden centrifuges, Iran retains an ability to break out and produce weapon-grade uranium,” the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington think tank founded by former IAEA weapons inspector David Albright, said on June 24.

Weapons-grade uranium is classified as uranium enriched to 90 percent or more.

Centrifugal Forces

Centrifuges – thousands of them — are essential to processing uranium, spinning a gasified version of the element at super-fast speeds and enriching it for use in fuel rods, for nuclear power plants – or for building a warhead.

Iran had about 20,000 centrifuges installed at the country’s two main enrichment sites: Fordow and Natanz. Fordow was the primary location for producing HEU, according to the IAEA.

US and Israeli officials suggest that much of Iran’s centrifuge capacity has been severely damaged, something that outside experts largely concur with.

The “attacks have effectively destroyed Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program,” the institute said. “It will be a long time before Iran comes anywhere near the capability it had before the attack.”

Installed in massive chambers, bolted to floors, and precisely tuned to spin at tremendously fast speeds, centrifuges are hard to move around.

Uranium, however, is easier to move around.

In the run-up to the June 22 attack, satellite imagery showed dozens of trucks lined up on the access roads leading to the tunnels into the Fordow mountain complex. Some experts said the trucks may have been bringing dirt to fill in the tunnel entrances, to protect against air strikes or even commando raids.

“Before the tunnels were filled, it is possible that the Iranians tried to move the enriched uranium kept at the site,” the Institute said.

But most of the HEU was probably stored at Isfahan, which has been hit by US and Israeli strikes. according to Jeffery Lewis, an arms control researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California. Isfahan’s tunnels were not hit by American or Israeli strikes, he said.

“No one knows where the HEU is now,” Lewis said in a post to X.

“Four hundred kilograms of HEU is a big deal, I don’t want to undersell the problems,” Decker Eveleth, a nuclear and deterrence expert at the Center for Naval Analyses, in suburban Washington. “It’s a major problem. It’s going to be really hard for the Iranians to figure out what to do, and do it in a way to evade detection.”

Two unnamed Israeli officials claimed that Iran’s HEU stockpile, and less-refined 20 percent, was buried at Isfahan and Fordow and would be difficult to recover, Axios, a Washington-based online news site.

“No one will know for sure for days” whether the HEU was moved, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told CBS News. “I doubt they moved it, because you really can’t move anything right now. The minute a truck starts driving somewhere, the Israelis have seen it, and they’ve targeted it and taken it out.”

Backup Forces

Iran is believed to have an unknown number of spare or backup centrifuges stored away some place.

Aside from the question of where the HEU is, the other question is how many there are, and how quickly they could be operational if Tehran wanted to take the final step to weaponize its HEU.

“The HEU is critically important, because…they’ve done 99 percent of the work to get to highly enriched, that’s the 450 kilograms,” Setter said. “That’s critically important.

“But they’re still missing that 1 percent of enrichment work [to reach weapons-grade],” he said. “And for that to work, they need working centrifuges. The question is how many they still have, how quickly they can operate them, and if they dare to do it.”

WASHINGTON

Confusion continues to swirl over the status of Iran’s highly-enriched uranium stockpile following US airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, with the US government increasingly shifting focus onto a parallel battle with the media over the narrative.

This shift suggests Washington is attempting to control the conversation, diverting attention from unresolved questions about the actual impact of the strikes. As the question of where Iran’s nuclear material truly lies remains unsettled, observers warn that critical facts are being obscured, leaving a void where clear answers should be.

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday said he was unaware of any intelligence suggesting Iran had moved any of its highly enriched uranium to shield it from US strikes on Iran’s nuclear programme over the weekend.

US military bombers carried out strikes against three Iranian nuclear facilities early Sunday local time using more than a dozen 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs. The results of the strikes are being closely watched to see how far they may have set back Iran’s nuclear programme.

“I’m not aware of any intelligence that I’ve reviewed that says things were not where they were supposed to be, moved or otherwise,” Hegseth said in an often fiery news conference.

Trump, who watched the exchange with reporters, echoed his defence secretary, saying it would have taken too long to remove anything.

“The cars and small trucks at the site were those of concrete workers trying to cover up the top of the shafts. Nothing was taken out of (the) facility,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, without providing evidence.

Yet, the fundamental question remains: where is Iran’s highly enriched uranium?

The US appears to be waging not only a physical strike but a strategic media campaign to frame the narrative as a clear-cut success, even as ambiguity clouds the facts on the ground. This media confrontation risks overshadowing the complex reality, that only Iran holds precise knowledge of its nuclear stockpile, and its sustained silence fuels suspicion and speculation.

Tehran’s strategic silence on this matter, observers said, can be interpreted as a calculated posture designed to exacerbate uncertainty and complicate adversaries’ responses.

By refusing to clarify the whereabouts and condition of its nuclear inventory, Iran maintains a powerful negotiating chip that keeps the US and its allies off-balance. This opacity amplifies the geopolitical leverage Iran wields, allowing it to calibrate its public posture and diplomatic engagement with maximal flexibility.

The US government’s counterstrategy, aggressively framing the narrative through public briefings and media engagement, appears intended to bolster domestic and international support by portraying the strikes as decisive and crippling. However, this approach risks backfiring as credible intelligence leaks and expert analyses question the scope of the damage inflicted, fuelling skepticism among observers and media alike. The resulting ‘battle of narratives’ threatens to obscure substantive discourse on the real challenges posed by Iran’s nuclear programme.

Richard Nephew, former Iran director at the US National Security Council, encapsulated this dilemma: “Iran knows where it is, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the public don’t, and if the [Americans/Israelis] do, they’re not telling.” This statement highlights the profound information asymmetry that hampers efforts to monitor and contain Iran’s nuclear developments.

Several experts cautioned this week that Iran likely moved a stockpile of near weapons-grade highly enriched uranium out of the deeply buried Fordow site before the strikes, and could be hiding it and other nuclear components in locations unknown to Israel, the US and UN nuclear inspectors.

They noted satellite imagery from Maxar Technologies showing “unusual activity” at Fordow last Thursday and Friday, with a long line of vehicles waiting outside an entrance to the facility. A senior Iranian source said on Sunday that most of the 60 percent highly enriched uranium had been moved to an undisclosed location before the US attack.

The Financial Times, citing European capitals, reported that Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile remains largely intact since it was not concentrated at Fordow.

Hegseth’s comments denying such claims came at the news briefing where he also accused the media of downplaying the success of the US strikes following a leaked, preliminary assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency suggesting they may have only set back Iran by months.

He said the assessment was low confidence, and, citing comments from CIA Director John Ratcliffe, said it had been overtaken by intelligence showing Iran’s nuclear programme was severely damaged and would take years to rebuild.

Hegseth described the strikes as “historically successful.” His comments came after Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Thursday that Iran would respond to any future US attack by striking American military bases in the Middle East.

Khamenei, 86, claimed victory after 12 days of war, and promised Iran would not surrender despite Trump’s calls.

During the news conference, Hegseth criticised the media, without evidence, for having an anti-Trump bias.

“It’s in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump because you want him not to be successful so bad,” Hegseth said. “There are so many aspects of what our brave men and women did that … because of the hatred of this press corps, are undermined,” he said.

Trump, who announced the news conference on Truth Social on Wednesday evening, praised it as: “One of the greatest, most professional, and most ‘confirming’ News Conferences I have ever seen!”

On X, Hegseth thanked Trump for his praise.

During the press conference, the top US general largely stuck to technical details, outlining the history of the bunker-busting bombs used. General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, showed a video testing the bombs on a bunker like the ones struck on Sunday.

Caine declined to provide his own assessment of the strike and deferred to the intelligence community. He denied being under any pressure to change his assessment to present a more optimistic view of the US strikes.

He also said he would not change his assessment due to politics. Uniformed military officials are supposed to remain apolitical and provide their best military advice.

“I’ve never been pressured by the president or the secretary to do anything other than tell them exactly what I’m thinking, and that’s exactly what I’ve done,” he said.

A leaked preliminary US intelligence report on assessment of Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities has concluded that the bombing did not destroy the nuclear program but only set it back by a few months – contrary to the claims made by the President. It further claims that despite the strikes and with little damage Iran’s nuclear sites have sustained, Tehran could restart its nuclear program within months.

The report also revealed that Iran relocated a significant portion of its highly enriched uranium – used to make a nuclear weapon – ahead of the strikes, transferring them to other secret nuclear sites.

The report was produced by Defense Intelligence Agency – a military intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense.

US media on Tuesday cited people familiar with the Defense Intelligence Agency findings as saying that Iran’s stockpile of nuclear enriched uranium were not fully destroyed in the US strikes.

The attack may rather just have sealed off the entrances to some nuclear facilities without destroying underground buildings.

Over the weekend, United States B-2 bombers hit two Iranian nuclear sites – Fordow and Natanz – with massive GBU-57 bunker-buster bombs, while a guided missile submarine struck a third, Isfahan, with Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Donald Trump called the strikes a “spectacular military success” and said they had “obliterated” the nuclear sites, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Washington’s forces had “devastated the Iranian nuclear program.”

WHITE HOUSE REACTS In its first reaction after the Pentagon report on US strikes, the White House said the report was classified as “top secret” but was still “leaked”. Confirming the authenticity of the assessment, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said it was attempt to demean the “brave fighter pilots”.

“The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program,” Karoline Leavitt posted on X.

“Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration,” she added.

HOW DONALD TRUMP REACTED TO LEAKED REPORT DETAILS As the details of the leaked Pentagon report on US strikes in Iran started to emerge, President Donald Trump rebuffed the intel findings, reiterating that the nuclear sites were “completely destroyed”.

Slamming some media channels, Donald Trump, in an all caps post, said they were attempting to demean one of the most successful strikes.

“FAKE NEWS CNN, TOGETHER WITH THE FAILING NEW YORK TIMES, HAVE TEAMED UP IN AN ATTEMPT TO DEMEAN ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL MILITARY STRIKES HISTORY,” Donald Trump said.

A leaked intel report on the early assessment of the damage wrought by US bombing on three Iranian nuclear strikes has concluded that the strike has only set Tehran’s nuclear programme back by a few months. As per reports, the damage was further lessened by the fact that Iran moved enriched uranium out of the sites before the US strikes. Citing people in the know, reports suggest that Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles were moved before US President Donald Trump ordered strikes that could destroy them. Trump, on his part, has doubled down on his “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites claim and has slammed news websites that published the US leaked intel.

Iran moved nuclear stockpiles

Citing two people familiar with the classified US assessment, CNN reported that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed and that its centrifuges were largely “intact.” One of the people who chose to stay anonymous claimed that the “enriched uranium was moved out of the sites prior to the US strikes”. Similarly, The New York Times reported that “much of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was moved before the strikes, which destroyed little of the nuclear material. Some of that may have been moved to secret nuclear sites maintained by Iran.”

Watch | U.S. intelligence says main components of nuke programmme not destroyed