Trump Says US Can Hit Iran’s Nuclear Fortress In One Hour, But Will It Take A Nuke?

President Donald Trump threatened to strike Iran’s heavily fortified Pickaxe Mountain nuclear facility during a Monday night interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity.

The renewed threat came one day after conservative commentator Tucker Carlson alleged that the administration was considering a nuclear strike against the facility. Experts previously told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Pickaxe Mountain’s deepest chambers could prove impossible to destroy with conventional weapons, potentially requiring a nuclear weapon to eliminate the underground complex entirely.

“My general sense is that conventional ordnance would be unlikely to decisively destroy such a deeply buried facility,” Philipp Bleek, fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, previously told the DCNF. “However, no matter how much a facility is buried, it must come to the surface via access tunnels, air shafts, etc. So even the most deeply buried facility can be entombed if intelligence and precision allow those locations to be effectively attacked.”

“Now, we might have to go after Pickaxe, but that’s not a big deal,” Trump said during his Monday night interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News.

The president suggested American forces could attack the underground facility in just one hour, adding that the military could act whenever he authorized it, according to a Roll Call transcript.

Trump portrayed the ongoing conflict with Iran as largely dormant, arguing that Tehran’s military had been devastated and that the United States possessed overwhelming military superiority. He nevertheless expressed optimism about reaching a diplomatic agreement, warning that fighting could resume if negotiations failed, according to the Fox News interview.

The president’s comments followed extraordinary allegations that his administration was considering deploying nuclear weapons against Iran.

The war has claimed the lives of 23 American service members and wounded another 865 since U.S. and Israeli operations began Feb. 28, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System. Eleven deaths were classified as hostile and 12 as nonhostile, including accidents, illness and other incidents, the Washington Post reported, citing the Pentagon’s Oct. 29 update.

The human toll in Iran has been considerably greater. At least 3,636 people, including 1,701 civilians and at least 254 children, had been killed by April 7, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency. That figure predates months of subsequent hostilities and therefore does not represent the complete death toll.