A Substack article on Iran's plan to build their atomic centrifuge operation under mountains:
The Mountain Kept Its Promise
Iran spent decades treating rock as if it were safety
Ron Coleman
Jul 21, 2026
There’s a mountain called Fordow near Qom, Iran, and inside it some people set up a machine shop to make some things. To put a finer point on it, for the better part of two decades Iran’s rulers have been burrowing deep, deep, deep into that mountain. They dug deeper than anyone could see, deeper than anyone could reach. In these caverns almost measureless to man the mullahs decreed a stately pleasure dome – for what could be more pleasurable for an apocalyptic death cult than enrichment halls sitting 80 to 90 meters down, under reinforced concrete, under the whole weight of the mountain besides?
It wasn’t a cheap thing to build. It took years, and money, and a kind of patience most governments, and certainly ones that give a damn about the welfare of their citizens, can’t manage. And it rested on a single, reasonable proposition: that if you put enough dirt and rock between your centrifuges and the sky, the sky can’t touch them.
Give these lunatics their due, because they earned it. This wasn’t paranoia and it wasn’t waste. The Iranians watched, over the years, what happens to a nuclear facility that trusts the open air - Osirak in an afternoon, the Syrian reactor in a night - and they drew exactly the right lesson from exactly the right evidence. Depth is cheaper than a war. A mountain doesn’t defect, doesn’t miss its intercept, doesn’t need to be talked into standing its post. The Israelis can’t bribe it. Against the threat they’d actually seen - a bomber, a payload, a facility that could be reached - Fordow wasn’t a foolish answer - it was close to the correct one. The IRGC’s engineers weren’t stupid. They were wicked smart.
How smart? Here’s what happened when the Yanks came for Fordow in June of 2025. The rock did what rock is supposed to and held like rock. Twelve of the largest conventional bombs in the US Air Force’s arsenal - the 30,000-pound penetrators built for precisely this mountain - dropped in six places, two to a spot to widen the wound, and the halls, 80 to 90 meters down, weren’t reached. If the match had been the bomb against the mountain, the mountain won on points.
But that wasn’t the contest, because the Americans have some clever folks at work too. The Air Force didn’t aim at the rock. By every indication it aimed at the holes, just like Luke Skywalker: the vents, the throats, the openings that as a matter of physics you have to have in a mountain you use to build, operate and live in. Especially the first two, because a centrifuge hall isn’t a bunker you climb into to wait out the storm. It’s a factory, it’s a working plant, it needs entry and exit for supplies, oxygen, carbon dioxide, stuff you’re making and also Iranians. Depth can do a lot of protecting but when it comes to something that works for a living, it’s not really a long-term plan.
So yes: The mountain kept its promise, all of it. Abundantly.
A little too abundantly. Because what the USAF did was turn that abundance of depth, that impenetrable layer of terra firma, into the world’s deadliest seal.
Iran had built a vault and then locked what it valued most; what it dearly desired to protect at all costs, tight within it. Its enrichment hall became an enrichment crypt. The centrifuges are, by every indication, down there still, safe and secure forever.
Well, who among us hasn’t suffered one buried facility? You can’t win ’em all. What turns a defeat into a fallacy is what you do the morning after - and here Iran has been generous enough to show its work.
Yup, they’re digging again. South of Natanz, in the Zagros range, stands a taller mountain than the one over Fordow, and inside it Iran has been carving a new set of halls since 2020. The Americans call it Pickaxe Mountain, which is certainly a real American thing to call a huge hunk of stone. And by stone I mean granite – not the limestone and dolostone that sat over Fordow, but hard rock, chosen because, like the stubbornest of mullahs, granite soaks up and scatters the shock of a bunker-buster better than softer stone does.
Depth failed in Fordow, but Iran’s answer wasn’t less depth. It was more of it, in harder currency.
But Ron, you protest, Fordow was last year, and you just said Pickaxe Peak started popping in 2020! I did say that but guess what: It’s happening now. Satellite imagery from this past February shows crews at Pickaxe pushing rock and earth back over a tunnel mouth and pouring a fresh concrete headworks to carry still more cover - reinforcing the new mountain against precisely the strike that had just gutted the old one. The IRGC’s deposit is being made as I write this sentence. They’re shoveling more mountain onto the same mistake, because, they seem to think, the problem at Fordow was that the tomb wasn’t tomby enough. Needs more tomb.
This mental habit isn’t confined to rock; it’s how the Islamic Republic has always kept its books. The virtually limitless oil wealth poured into a ring of proxies, on the theory that the money and the menace were bottomless - and then Hezbollah, the Syrian corridor, the whole expensive network, degraded or gone in a season, the assets destroyed alongside the men they were meant to shield. The martyr’s willingness and the regime’s own legitimacy, drawn down for 40 years as though the well refilled itself while nobody watched the level.
Whether it’s physical depth, petrodollars, or unquenchable bloodlust: 3 accounts, 1 accounting error. Each was real. None, not even the last one, will ultimately prove to be in infinite supply. Proxies and suicide bombers are enthusiastic, but “idealism” only gets you so far. All these murder operations run on money, and Iran’s money ships out through one place: Kharg Island, a coral speck in the Gulf that loads something like 9 of every 10 barrels the Republic sells. Washington has spent the summer openly weighing whether to simply take it. Which is why the economic outlook in late July is, shall we say, not quite as robust as it was even in June - back when there was still a ceasefire, and the terminal that funds the whole enterprise wasn’t one Presidential order away from changing hands.
What Iran has left is now, fittingly, unknowable - to Iran most of all. The inspectors have been gone since February, thrown out along with the last people equipped to tell Tehran what it actually still holds. Estimates of the surviving centrifuges are exactly that, estimates, models built in the dark by outsiders. A regime that mistook insanely deep piles of dirt for permanence has arrived at the last cost of that mistake: it can’t count its own reserves, because it evicted the only ones doing the counting.
So there are 2 mountains now. One is sealed, keeping its useless promise over a crypt full of the safety it failed to deliver. The other is still open at the top, still taking deposits, granite going in by the truckload against the day the sky comes back. The men ordering the shoveling have already seen how this ends. They watched it end at Fordow a year ago. But in true Islamic Republic fashion, they’re digging anyway - deeper this time, into harder rock, certain, the way you can only be certain of a thing that’s never yet run out on you, that this mountain will be the one that holds.
