“We may hit Pickaxe Mountain very soon,” President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House last Friday, underscoring a public willingness to use force that sits alongside classified preparations reported elsewhere.
DTRA’s sole‑source award to Pate Construction at ALT‑SHIST (Feb. 27, 2026)
On February 27, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) issued a sole‑source contract to Pate Construction Co., Inc., for construction work at the Alternate Seismic Hardrock in Situ Test site (ALT‑SHIST) inside White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), the agency announced quietly that week. A formal DTRA justification, approved on February 24, described the work as “the immediate and mission‑critical enabling services for a ‘real‑world’ national security ordinance [sic; ordnance] test” and said the effort was “highly specialized” and a “critical path dependency for a live‑fire test designed to validate classified capabilities against rapidly emerging threats.” The justification emphasized Pate’s decade‑long incumbency and “non‑transferable tacit knowledge” of the subterranean test facility and said Pate “is the only contractor that currently maintains a fully mobilized presence at WSMR with the specific heavy equipment and security‑cleared operators required.”
Connection drawn to planning against Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain
CNN reported that unnamed sources “familiar with the matter” linked the ALT‑SHIST contract and planned testing to preparations for a possible operation targeting Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain, a deeply buried site near Natanz. CNN said the planned testing was tied to a “need to develop a way to target Iran’s deepest‑buried underground facilities and, likely, simulate U.S. strikes against specific nuclear facilities,” though the network also said it was unable to independently verify whether the test actually occurred. The Pentagon did not respond to questions about the test, CNN reported.
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End the scrambleWhite Sands test infrastructure: SHIST, ALT‑SHIST, and the Granite Test Site
ALT‑SHIST, established in 1995, is one of several subterranean test areas within WSMR. The original SHIST has been in use since 1993 and, according to a 2015 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) study, “the granite bedrock at these sites has been fractured and damaged by extensive testing.” USACE created a newer Granite Test Site to succeed the original SHIST; WSMR contains multiple sites designed to simulate underground and hardened targets. DTRA and other Defense Department entities have used the range repeatedly to develop and validate earth‑penetrating weapons and related technologies.
Pickaxe Mountain activity, MOPs, and the technical challenge
Pickaxe Mountain sits immediately southwest of Iran’s Natanz complex and is built under granite — a geological feature that makes it a particular focus for penetration testing. The GBU‑57/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a roughly 30,000‑pound‑class air‑dropped bunker buster, was developed with DTRA involvement and has been tested at WSMR in the past. MOPs were used during strikes last year on Fordow and Natanz as part of Operation Midnight Hammer; in those attacks, multiple GBU‑57/Bs were dropped on the same impact points in rapid succession to try to burrow deeper into underground cavities. CSIS warned that Pickaxe Mountain is an “underground fortress buttressed by granite” and that degrading it “requires more than just kinetic force – it takes actionable high‑confidence intelligence and sophisticated mathematical modeling.”
Technical limits noted in the reporting include a medium‑to‑low inventory of GBU‑57/Bs and the operational restriction that U.S. B‑2 Spirit bombers are the only aircraft currently certified to employ MOPs. The U.S. effort to field a successor, the GBU‑76/B Next Generation Penetrator (NGP), remains in prototyping with work expected through the end of Fiscal Year 2028; a 2024 report said the prime contractor Boeing was expanding production capacity for MOPs.
What this means for DTRA, the U.S. Air Force, and Iran
- DTRA: The agency’s contracting documents and the sole‑source award indicate DTRA is preparing specialized subterranean facilities for live‑fire validation. DTRA’s stated schedule and repair work on Tunnel 7 under a separate Millstone Willemite 6 (MW‑6) project show an ongoing tunnel‑specific testing program through mid‑2027.
- U.S. Air Force: Operational employment of GBU‑57/Bs rests on platform certification — currently limited to the B‑2 — and the supply of the weapons. The Air Force and acquisition partners face the dual constraint of limited stockpiles and a multi‑year NGP prototyping timeline.
- Iran: CSIS and satellite analyses recorded a surge in construction activity at Pickaxe Mountain in 2026, including portal hardening and road paving, while noting a lack of observed increased security posture that could indicate the facility is not yet configured for enrichment work. That pattern matters because U.S. testing at WSMR sites like ALT‑SHIST is framed in reporting as directly relevant to the challenge of attacking deeply buried targets such as Pickaxe Mountain.
Satellite imagery of ALT‑SHIST showed visible work between mid‑February and mid‑March 2026; CNN and TWZ both noted imagery linking on‑the‑ground activity to the contracting action but could not confirm the tests themselves. Whether observed work at White Sands and the construction activity at Pickaxe Mountain will culminate in a strike remains an open question — one framed by the competing realities the public record shows: operational statements from the president, specialized DTRA contracting and tunnel repair schedules, and intelligence and imagery assessments by CSIS and others.
