Pickaxe Mountain next? New activity at US bunker-buster test site fuels speculation

Construction work at an obscure underground weapons test site in New Mexico is drawing fresh attention, with CNN reporting the activity may be tied to planning for a potential future strike on Iran's toughest nuclear facility, Pickaxe Mountain, a site the US and Israel have notably left untouched through multiple rounds of strikes so far.The link traces back to February 27, the day before the initial wave of US-Israeli strikes on Iran, when the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) quietly awarded a sole-source contract to Pate Construction for work at the Alternate Seismic Hardrock in Situ Test (ALT-SHIST) site, tucked inside the sprawling White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico's Jornada del Muerto desert. DTRA, a relatively low-profile agency, leads US military efforts on countering weapons of mass destruction. The agency helped develop the 30,000-pound GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, the bunker-buster bomb that made its combat debut striking Iran's underground facilities at Fordow and Natanz during Operation Midnight Hammer, after being extensively tested at White Sands beforehand.There's speculation a different site within the same range may have been used to rehearse the actual Fordow strike plan, which involved slamming six GBU-57s in rapid succession into each of two ventilation shafts, burrowing progressively deeper with every hit. Notably, White Sands also holds the site of the world's first atomic bomb test in 1945.DTRA's official justification for the February contract made no mention of Iran, citing only an urgent national security requirement, and caution is warranted since ALT-SHIST is a continuously active site with other ongoing projects, including separate work on its Tunnel 7 section dating back to last year. The facility, established in 1995 as a successor to the original 1993 SHIST site, is just one of several hardened-target test ranges DTRA operates within White Sands. Whether or not this particular contract relates to Pickaxe Mountain specifically remains unconfirmed, but the site's continued survival through several rounds of US and Israeli strikes keeps it firmly in the conversation.