--- title: "Could the US REALLY Nuke Iran?" description: "This episode examines Tucker Carlson's unverified claim that the Trump administration may launch a nuclear strike against Iran's fortified Pickaxe Mountain facility. While acknowledging Carlson's poor credibility, the analysis explores his White House connections, regional tensions, conventional weapon limitations, and the catastrophic consequences should America break the longstanding nuclear taboo." url: https://fronts.co/videos/could-the-us-really-nuke-iran.md canonical: https://fronts.co/videos/could-the-us-really-nuke-iran/ datePublished: 2026-11-03T19:30:14.000Z dateModified: 2026-11-03T19:30:14.000Z author: - name: Fronts Staff url: https://fronts.co/authors/fronts-team/ publisher: Fronts image: "https://media.fronts.co/cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,height=630,fit=cover,gravity=auto,quality=80,format=auto/images/video-library/warfronts-middle-east-1200.webp" type: NewsArticle language: en access: members isAccessibleForFree: false tokens: 5441 --- Today, we have to seriously examine a claim by Tucker Carlson. Buckle up for yourself a drink, happy midterms day for the Americans. On Sunday night, one of America's most well-connected political operatives decided to hop onto X and post an extended, deeply concerning claim that, quote, "under pressure from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Trump administration may be within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran." According to Carlson, the strike would target Iran's pickaxe mountain, a deeply buried nuclear facility that's thought to be well outside the reach of conventional American bunker busters. If it were to be successful, which is far from a guarantee, then supposedly, Iran's nuclear weapons program would be done. At the same time, the United States would have just broken the single most important geopolitical taboo in all of human history, ushering in an unbelievably dangerous phase of the modern era. Now, hopefully, Carlson's just lying as he has done a million times before, and as he will do a million more times in the future, allegedly. But when a guy who's that well-connected to the White House makes a claim this incendiary just days before the Middle East really is expected to return to full-scale war, well, unfortunately, we have to take notice. So today, we're asking a question that, in a better world, we would never, ever, ever have to ask. Is there any chance that the US would actually nuke Iran? The Claim Now, before we even start with today's discussion, we have to make something very clear. It is the assessment of our war front steam, as well as the assessment of most experts we've seen weigh in on this issue that Tucker Carlson's claim is almost certainly bullish. We're citing a report from a figure with an extensive history of reporting fabrications and cultivating misinformation, an intensely partisan conspiracy theorist with such a unique combination of poor discernment, ulterior motives, and ravenous hunger for engagement. But he was the first Western journalist to platform Russian President Vladimir Putin after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Moreover, we're discussing a report that many global analysts, including people, our team of researchers, very deeply respects, have dismissed as ludicrous, hysterical, disingenuous, and fundamentally just not credible. And yet, we've made this episode anyway, and it is important to explain why. Fundamentally, three things are true about Tucker Carlson's claim that caught our team's attention and swayed our decision. Observation No. 1. Carlson remains a very well-connected member of the American far right, with close contacts in the White House, up to and including Vice President J.D. Vance. As American political commentator Tim Miller put it, rather succinctly, in his own social media post, "Tucker is both a fabulous and also someone people in the administration call, so shrug emoji. On which one this is?" Observation No. 2. This is a really, really big swing, entirely out of nowhere, for which Carlson draws no immediate political benefit. His statement isn't going to draw any pickup from major news outlets due to his aforementioned reputational damage, and there's no real path for his political fortunes to improve by levying an off-the-wall claim like this one. Certainly, he's generated a bit of buzz, and we at Warfronts are now a part of that buzz. But if the goal of the day was cheap clicks, Carlson is very adept at creating headlines that would generate better algorithm pickup and be amplified further by mainstream outlets. Just hit the whole Epstein saga again from some new angle, and it is off to the races, isn't it? Observation No. 3. This is an exceptionally serious claim, no matter who's making it. Extraordinary claims, of course, require extraordinary evidence, and Carlson, as of the time of writing, has provided no evidence. But when that extraordinary claim is that the United States is considering the imminent use of a nuclear warhead in an armed conflict, it also requires extraordinary scrutiny because of just how catastrophic it would be if there were to be any shred of truth behind the statement. Unfortunately, we can't rule out Carlson's claim, but we can at least provide some context as to what's actually going on in the Middle East, and as to the specific problems in the region that make this claim, again, this unsubstantiated claim, worth discussing. So let's start with what Carlson actually said in a post on X that was published on Sunday evening at local time in the United States. It is a long post, we will link to it below if you'd like to read the whole thing, but these are the basics. According to Carlson, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pressuring the Trump administration to carry out a nuclear strike against Iran, quote, "within days." As mentioned, that strike would target Iran's Pickaxe Mountain installation, a deeply buried facility roughly one and a half kilometers south of the Natanz nuclear complex that the U.S., a Israeli intelligence believes to be connected to the Iranian nuclear program. For a bit of extra context here, Pickaxe Mountain is made mostly a very dense granite with the important parts of the facility buried roughly 100 meters beneath the mountain 's surface. Deep enough that one Iranian government adviser called it "the most heavily fortified nuclear facility in the world" earlier in 2026. Citing on name sources and, quote, "close observers," Carlson claims that "no American or Israeli conventional weapon can borrow far enough to destroy the facility with the immense power of a nuclear strike supposedly being the only way to break through." Now, according to Carlson, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Heggseth and General Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, both support the strike, while Vice President J.D. Vance and Envoy Steve Wickoff are each opposed. Carlson claims that Trump is currently inclined to listen to Wickoff and Vance, but the president has set an informal deadline to make a final decision on the 7th of November. Zooming out Now, we should mention one more time for posterity's sake here. Tucker Carlson is neither a credible source, nor has he produced any corrobor ating evidence to support his claim. His account also includes some details that would be extremely surprising, if true, including the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Rat cliffe, and the leaders of America's Democratic Party are broadly aligned with Netanyahu's alleged position, although the post is phrased in a way that makes it unclear whether those people would support nuclear action or simply a return to conventional hostilities. Also, Trump was asked about this very issue in October and explicitly ruled out the use of a nuclear warhead against Iran. So, by Trump's own admission, this should be a non-issue. And yet, as we've already noted, this is a massive claim to make out of nowhere, especially considering Carlson 's level of access within the administration. We also happen to live in a time when, unfortunately, level-headed reassurances from knowledgeable, well-intentioned experts who claim that there's nothing to see here or insist that the Trump administration would never do something transparently stupid and horrifically misguided have helped the world to sleepwalk into quite a few major crises this year. And as for Trump's statements against using a nuclear weapon from October, we trust that you'll understand our hesitation in trusting claims by America's commander-in-chief. So, let's talk about the broader situation in the Middle East, where a growing consensus of global observers does agree that a return to war is likely. According to a range of rewards in various reliable outlets, the Trump administration has been drawing up plans for a rapid resumption of strikes against Iran within weeks or even days after the midterm election. Generally, those hypothetical strikes are described as brief but intense, based on a belief across a fair share of Trump's inner circle that one more round of devastating airstrikes against Iran would force the Islamic Republic to finally capitulate. Trump himself has been referencing the possibility quite often, whether in his campaign appearances ahead of today 's vote, or in a recent Fox News interview. As for whether the Trump team seems to have a good assessment of the situation, we'll quote "regional expert" Danny Sitchin ovich. "Another war against Iran could be, again, an operational military achievement and a resounding strategic failure," end quote. Iranian leaders have openly threatened to expand the scope and scale of their regional retaliation if the US were to attack, and Tehran does retain the ability to escalate in several directions. To name a few, Iran could turn its attention to a more concentrated attack against Persian Gulf energy infrastructure, start targeting the desalination plants that the Gulf population depends on, or seek to coordinate a multi-directional response alongside its proxy allies in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen. To be clear, this is a much longer conversation, so let us know in the comments if you'd like us to discuss Iran's retaliatory options at greater length. Even though the pro-war section of Trump's inner circle doesn't seem to be taking that possibility seriously, the risk of broad Iranian retaliation against a large-scale air campaign has helped to push other options into the conversation. That's where pickaxe mounts in comes in. The final surviving, suspected major nuclear facility that Trump hasn't hit directly during his second term. Trump strikes against other Iranian facilities don't appear to, of course, the wholesale destruction that he initially promised, but those strikes did purportedly help to bury nuclear material and enrichment equipment that Iran hasn't yet seemed willing to try and dig out. Breaking through to pickaxe, however, is another level of difficulty. As we mentioned, the facility is hidden under roughly 100 meters or over 300 feet of solid granite, meaning that most weapons don't even have a hope of breaking through. In recent weeks, Trump has reportedly been considering using one of America's largest conventional bombs, that GBU-43B, colloquially referred to as the "mother of all bombs," or their "mobe," but the "mobe" is an airburst thermobaric weapon, not a ground penetrating bunker buster, so what Trump would probably use instead is the GBU- 57 massive ordinance penetrator or MOP. The US used several MOPs in 2025 round of strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, but on paper, they're still not enough to get through to pickaxe mountain. The actual limits of their capabilities are probably undisclosed, but according to publicly available figures, they can burrow through roughly 60 meters of Earth or roughly 18 meters of high-strength reinforced concrete. Because they are so precise, they can be used to burrow into the same hole with multiple bombs in sequence so that the first bomb burrows, blows up, and loosens a bunch of Earth before the second one arrives. The US did exactly that in its strikes in 2025, but even that didn't seem enough to fully destroy Iran's nuclear sites, according to US intelligence reports at that time. Getting through to pickaxe mountain will be even harder. Even worse, the US is only thought to possess a single-digit number of MOPs right now, with 14 expended in the strikes in 2025. So the thing he goes, this is when the US would seek to deploy a nuclear war head with a far higher explosive yield than any conventional weapon in the American arsenal. Although we couldn't claim any clear intentionality around this trend, the use of lower-yield nuclear warheads, often referred to as tactical nuclear warheads, has been a growing part of the discourse around US military operations since the start of Trump's second turn. Across this year, the US Pentagon has been drafting a new, classified nuclear strategy that would allegedly make it easier to use tactical warheads when the US fights regional wars like this one, while other policy bills and draft proposals have also been focusing on making tactical warheads more accessible and easier to deploy. That's a trend that Tucker Carlson did name quite accurately in his recent post. There is a technical barrier to consider. On paper, the MOP is a strictly conventional weapon, while America's deepest penetrating nuclear gravity bomb would struggle to bore through 10 meters of rock. But if America's technological capabilities are there, then the US could solve that problem in one of three ways. America's best bunker buster, the B61, uses a directional shockwave that could purportedly crush hardened bunkers at up to 100 meters if it uses its maximum yield. Alternatively, the MOP could conceivably be modified to carry a nuclear warhead, although any program that would accomplish that task is currently unknown. Most risk-able, perhaps the most feasible on short notice, the US could also use a conventional MOP to borrow closer to the big masculinity before dropping a tactical warhead through the ball hole and deton ating deeper into the mountain. As for the political pressure on the White House, well, that part 's hard to miss. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has indeed been hounding the Trump administration to resume at strikes on Iran, especially now that Netanyahu's political bloc has failed to gain a majority after Israel's elections last week. Netanyahu will continue to serve in a caretaker role until he or his rivals can form a government. But if he can't secure 61 of the Knesset's 120 seats, then he's likely to face a wave of investigations over myriad issues and scandals. Israeli media reported that one call between Trump and Netanyahu held last Saturday was so secretive that even Netanyahu's own closest advisers weren't included. In the US, meanwhile, Trump has reportedly been waiting to strike Iran until after the midterm election, and in the event of a sweeping victory for his rivals in the Democratic Party, he may seek to demonstrate the power he still holds as America's commander-in-chief. And from America's allies in the Middle East to its allies in Europe, foreign capitals appear to be immensely concerned about what this phase of biting might bring. One Democratic Senator, who's been briefed on Trump's war plans, Chris Murphy, alleged in statement a few days ago that there is something major to worry about. Quoting Murphy on the 29th of October, "Some of us have been briefed on the war plan, and while I cannot disclose any details, I can say this. The plan is insane. It will not achieve objectives, and it will set off a new cycle of escalation." Two days after he made that statement, 53-year-old Murphy was hospitalized due to a stroke. The Impact As we conclude today's episode, we certainly don't mean to provide an endorsement of Carlson's claim, or to say that the combination of factors we've just outlined mean that Trump really is considering a nuclear strike against PICAC's mountain. But we would be remiss to end this episode without pointing out what an utter, unmitigated catastrophe a nuclear strike like this would be. For the United States, for its allies, for Iran, and for the entire world, the combat use of a nuclear weapon would be the disaster of our lifetimes, and a decision that would shift the entire world on its axis in the worst possible way. We said it at the start of this episode, and it is worth saying again. The informal global agreement among the nine nuclear powers not to use the nuclear weapons at their disposal is the single most important taboo in human history. We are a species with the capacity to destroy itself several times over, using a wonder weapon that has been deployed before, twice across a three-day span in 1945. And yet, nuclear powers from the US to Russia to China to Israel to North Korea to India, Pakistan and beyond have never again used the weapons at their disposal. That prohibition is absolute. There is no room for nuance. There is zero flexibility, and under that taboo, there are zero acceptable use cases to launch a nuclear weapon, except a case in which nuclear weapons have already been launched against you. That inflexibility is vitally important, because it means that there is no risk of nuclear creep, where the use of a low-yield warhead leads to the use of a slightly high-yield warhead and so on, and so forth, until the whole world explodes. But the absolute prohibition also comes with a major drawback, once a single country violates that prohibition, all bets are off. Quite frankly, we can sit here and discuss tactics all day, but it is unbelievably naive to try and carve out an exception for tactical nuclear weapons. That is a totally undefined classification, with no international understanding of how to manage the distinction between tactical and strategic nuclear weapon use and any government decision-maker in any nuclear nation who would argue otherwise is best off getting their head examined. In every other realm of global affairs, including the use of other weapons of mass destruction, it is in individual nations' interests to try and bend the rules, see what they could get away with, and try to give themselves permission to escalate, all while routinely contradicting their own public statements and international obligations. In modern history, our civilization has managed not to do that once on the single issue that matters most of all. Once that absolute taboo is thrown away, we will not get it back, and we will not be able to replace it with a new nuclear taboo that tactical warhead enthusiasts would find more convenient. If the United States were to undo the world's nuclear weapons prohibition, then even if other nations started small by using lower-yield warheads of their own, the escalation and spread of their use would begin almost immediately. If the US is supposedly within its right to use tactical warheads against Iran, then Russia is certainly within its right to use those warheads in Ukraine. North Korea could easily justify deploying its own weapons against the South. India and Pakistan haven't not been on a hair trigger in the last several decades, and New Delhi and Islamabad would each have real incentives to use warheads as soon as possible, fearing that the other side would beat them to the punch. Israel would be entirely able to use its unacknowledged arsenal to cement a new order in the Middle East, and certainly to keep on hitting Iran, even if the US were content to stop after Pickaxe Mountain. When the total nuclear taboo goes away, and there's not an alternative universally understood taboo to replace it, every nation can justify creeping up the escalation ladder by choosing to invent and then claiming to follow whatever rules suit them. Israel, for example, can follow the use of one American warhead against Pickaxe Mountain by raining 20 warheads down on Tehran. But if Israel uses lower-yield warheads than the United States did, then Israel can justify the incredible civilian casualties, saying, "Eh, this new order, it's the yield that really matters." Or Russia could use much higher-yield warheads to create an irradiated wall of open land between the Donbas region and the rest of Ukraine, saying, "Hey, it's not the yield that that is, it's the civilian casualties, and we didn't strike civilian areas." In a nuclear armed world where the rules are unclear, it's in every nation's interest to create a new set of rules that serves itself. But if every nuclear armed nation is playing that same game, then those same nations will find their way into direct confrontations much sooner than each of them might have imagined. And if against all odds Coulson is telling the truth, then it's worth pointing out that the United States doesn't even need to destroy Pickaxe Mountain. Decades of American policy against a nuclear Iran have been largely premised on the idea that Iran is an irrational actor, liable to use any nuclear weapons with the goal of causing maximum destruction. But over the course of this war, Iran has consistently demonstrated that although its interests and tactics are very different than America's, it remains a rational actor. Iran has demonstrated a very keen ability to navigate proportional escal ations and de-escalations. It's consistently held itself back from striking the targets where it could cause the greatest damage. Quite frankly, if the world is willing to live with North Korea and its nuclear arsenal, then it's not worth throwing away the entire global nuclear order just to keep Iran out of the club. Unfortunately for Washington, this war has confirmed Iran's suspicions that obtaining a nuclear weapon would prevent future conflicts of this kind. But destroying the global nuclear order doesn't undo America's failure on that issue. Again, Coulson's claims are entirely unsubstantiated. They are the work of a serial political provocateur and are almost certainly not worth the minute or two required to read them. But when it's a claim, that big, with consequences, this extreme, at a moment, this sensitive, sadly we don't have the luxury of waving it all away. Thank you for watching.