September 10th, 2026: Iran Hardens Pickaxe Mountain & Netanyahu Faces October 7 Warning Report

Mike Baker (0:13)

It's Thursday, the 10th of September. Welcome to The President's Daily Brief. I'm Mike Baker, your eyes and ears on the world stage. All right, let's get briefed. First up, remember Iran's nuclear program? Well, it kind of got pushed off the radar because the focus has been on the battle over control for the Strait of Hormuz.

Now it's back on the radar. Iran is reportedly accelerating work at a deeply buried nuclear site near Natanz, as the US military considers how to destroy it. I'll have the details. Later in the show, a new report claims that the UAE warned Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu days before October 7, 2023, that Hamas was preparing a major attack. It's a report that Netanyahu's office denies. Plus, North Korea has built another uranium enrichment facility, as inspectors warn that Kim Jong-un is continuing to expand his nuclear weapons infrastructure. And in today's Back of the Brief, the US military takes out what officials describe as a cartel-linked floating gas station used to keep drug-running boats at sea. But first, today's PDB Spotlight.

Iran appears to be accelerating work at Pickaxe Mountain, the deeply-buried nuclear complex near Natanz that US officials have openly discussed targeting. And new satellite imagery suggests the activity there is now more intense than at any point since construction began. According to a new analysis from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Iran has dramatically increased activity across the site this year. Researchers examined six years of satellite imagery and found heavy traffic across every major road leading through the complex, along with new paving, reinforced access points and significant work around the tunnel entrances. The pattern suggests Iran may be moving beyond the excavation stage and into the actual build-out of whatever will ultimately operate inside the mountain. Piles created by years of digging are being removed or flattened, internal roads are being hardened, and several entrances appear more heavily reinforced than they were even last year.

For those who have been following this story here on the PDB, Pickaxe Mountain is already somewhat familiar. The facility sits just south of the towns and is buried deep inside a granite mountain, making it one of the hardest targets remaining in Iran's nuclear infrastructure. What remains unclear is exactly what Tehran intends to put inside this complex. Israeli intelligence has reportedly told the US that Iran moved centrifuges and centrifuge components into Pickaxe Mountain last year. But CSIS says the latest satellite imagery cannot confirm that claim. In fact, analysts found some evidence suggesting the facility may not yet be ready for enrichment. Construction activity remains intense. There has not been a major increase in security posture around the site, and analysts have not observed the kind of specialized vehicles or equipment that they might expect if an enrichment operation were already running underground. So there's no open source evidence that centrifuges are currently spinning beneath Pickaxe Mountain. But there is increasingly strong evidence that Iran is racing to finish and reinforce the facility. And that raises the other half of this story, whether the US can actually destroy it. President Trump has repeatedly suggested that Pickaxe Mountain could be targeted, saying last week that the US may strike the site soon.

But Pickaxe Mountain presents a much harder problem than many of the nuclear facilities that the US and Israel have already attacked. The largest conventional bunker-busting weapon in the American arsenal is referred to as the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator. It's a roughly 30,000-pound bomb carried by the B-2 stealth bomber. It was used during Operation Midnight Hammer against Iran's Fordow enrichment site. At Fordow, the US reportedly dropped multiple massive ordnance penetrators onto the same target areas, using earlier explosions to create craters that allowed later bombs to drive their force deeper underground. But Fordow also had identifiable weaknesses.

Ventilation shafts provided pathways into the underground centrifuge halls, and US and Israeli intelligence apparently had a detailed understanding of the facility's internal structure.

Pickaxe Mountain may be different. Open source estimates suggest that parts of the complex could sit roughly 80 to 100 meters underground, although its exact depth and internal layout remain uncertain. The mountain itself is granite, and the tunnel entrances have been designed with bends that make it harder for missiles or blast waves to travel directly into the complex. CIS notes that even the GBU-57 may not be enough to reliably destroy what's buried there. That means the objective of a future strike might not be to crush the entire facility. One alternative would be to attack the tunnel entrances and effectively seal Pickaxe Mountain off. The US used a similar approach at the underground nuclear complex in Isfahan in 2025, firing cruise missiles at tunnel portals rather than trying to destroy the entire underground structure. And that makes the construction that's now visible at Pickaxe especially interesting. Iran is reinforcing those entrances. The roads are being hardened. The portals are becoming more heavily protected. CNN has reported on a Pentagon document describing US preparations for a classified live fire test intended to validate capabilities against rapidly emerging threats. Sources familiar with the effort said the work was connected to deeply buried Iranian facilities and potentially involved simulations of attacks against specific nuclear targets.