The Mountain and the Bomb

On Monday morning a retired schoolteacher who stops with us every fall on her way down to see her sister came to the front desk, held out her phone, and asked me whether I thought the President was really going to drop an atom bomb on Iran this weekend. She had been up half the night reading it. So, by the look of things, had half the country. Late on Sunday Tucker Carlson posted a long warning on X that the administration may be within days of a nuclear strike on a place called Pickaxe Mountain, and that Benjamin Netanyahu is the man pushing for it. By the time the polls opened on Tuesday the post had been seen tens of millions of times. The usual people called him a liar, a clown and worse, and the White House said he had a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome and no insight into anything. I told the schoolteacher I didn’t know, which was the truth. I have spent the two days since, a good part of them on my knees scrubbing out the shower in Number One, trying to work out what in the post deserves to be believed, and what doesn’t, and why it caught fire the way it did. I think the answer to the last question matters more than the other two.

Start with what he actually said, because a good many of the people shouting at him have plainly not read it. Carlson did not say a nuclear strike had been ordered. He said the administration may be within days of one. His story runs like this. Israeli intelligence says Iran has restarted enrichment in tunnels under Pickaxe Mountain, near Natanz. The tunnels sit under about three hundred feet of granite, which no conventional bomb in our arsenal can get through, so the only way to destroy them from the air is with a nuclear weapon. Netanyahu wants it done, and an unnamed “informed observer” says he calls Trump about it every day. He needs it done because last week’s Israeli election left him short of a majority, and without Trump’s help he is finished as prime minister and facing his criminal trial without the shelter of office. Hegseth and the CENTCOM commander, Admiral Brad Cooper, are pushing to restart the war, and Rubio and the CIA are following. Vance and Steve Witkoff are arguing for a deal, and Trump, to his credit, is hesitating. A decision is likely by November 7. If the bomb falls, Carlson says, Russia and others will take it as permission to go nuclear with their own troubles, and “after the first nuclear strike, World War Three is inevitable.”

That is a serious charge carefully hedged, with one or two lines in it that are not hedged at all. It deserves to be taken apart piece by piece rather than waved away.

A good deal of it checks out. Netanyahu is exactly as cornered as Carlson says. The Israelis voted on October 27, and his bloc came back with 53 seats in a Knesset of 120, down from 64 in 2022, with 61 needed to govern. Likud is still the biggest party, but the opposition under Gadi Eisenkot has a path to a majority if it can bring in the Arab parties, and Netanyahu has answered the count by alleging fraud, which the election committee says it can find no evidence of. He has been on trial for corruption since 2020. A man in that position has every reason to want a war that keeps him necessary, and every reason to want the American President close.

The mountain is real too. Pickaxe Mountain, Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La to the Iranians, has been dug into for years, and the specialists who follow these things agree that its deepest caverns are probably beyond the reach of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, the thirty-thousand-pound bomb we used on Fordow last year. At Fordow it took six of those bombs, dropped one after another down the same two ventilation shafts, to get at what was underneath. Nobody outside the government knows whether Pickaxe has shafts like that, or how many of the bombs we have left. Iran denies there is any nuclear work there at all.

So is the damage at sea. A Reuters review of the shipping registers found eleven supertankers damaged around Hormuz in October alone, more than thirty since the war began, and October was the worst month for attacks on shipping since the first weeks of the war. And Carlson is not the only man in Washington who thinks the plan for the next round is mad. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who has been briefed on it, said last week that he couldn’t give details but that the plan was insane and would lead to devastating escalation. A senator who has read the plan is not usually that blunt about it in public.

Now the weak points, and there are several. The central claim, that a nuclear strike is being weighed and might come this week, rests on people Carlson does not name. That doesn’t make it false. Most of what we have learned about this war has come from people nobody would name. But it means we are taking his word for it, and he has been at war with this White House since the spring, which gives him a motive to believe the worst. Trump himself has been asked about nuclear weapons more than once. In April he called it a stupid question and said a nuclear weapon should never be used by anybody, and he said much the same in August. On Monday, asked whether he meant to attack Iran after the election, he said no. None of that settles anything, coming from this man, but it is on the record.

The line that a nuclear strike is “the only military option” is simply wrong. The people who study buried targets for a living point out that you can bomb the entrances shut and keep bombing them, cut the power and the ventilation, wreck everything on the surface, sabotage the machinery through computers, or put soldiers on the ground, which the Israelis did to an underground missile plant in Syria in 2024. Every one of those is ugly and some are reckless. None of them is a hydrogen bomb. Carlson also says the leaders of the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama himself, are following Netanyahu’s lead and oppose the deal being drafted in Doha. That may be true, but he gives us nothing to check it against.

Then there is “World War Three is inevitable.” Nothing in human affairs is inevitable, and a man trying to persuade the President not to do something rash should be careful about sounding rash himself. I would put it differently. The first nuclear weapon used in anger since Nagasaki would tell every government that owns one that the rule against using them was only a habit, and that the country which wrote the rule has stopped keeping it. The Russians would not need permission after that. They would need only an excuse. You don’t have to believe in an automatic world war to see that this is a very bad door to open.

So why did seven hundred words from a podcaster frighten so many sensible people? I think it is because the post did no more than state out loud where the logic of this war has been heading since February.

Look at how it has gone. The stated aim from the start was that Iran must never have the bomb. We were told in June of last year that Fordow and Natanz had been obliterated. Then we were told in February that the program had to be destroyed again. Now we are told it may have moved somewhere deeper. Each round the Iranians dig further down, and each round the weapons we have reach a little less far. If you commit yourself to destroying something you can’t reach, and you rule out the one way of stopping it that doesn’t involve bombs, which is a deal, you will sooner or later find yourself standing in front of the one weapon that can reach it. Nobody has to want a nuclear strike for that to happen. They only have to keep promising total victory and keep refusing to accept anything less.

And this President has given everybody reason to wonder. In April, before one of his deadlines, he announced on Truth Social that a whole civilization would die that night, never to be brought back, and that he didn’t want it to happen but it probably would. He had been threatening Iran’s bridges and power plants all that week, and that is probably what he meant. But when the commander in chief talks like that, he can’t complain when ordinary people take him at his word. The schoolteacher at my desk had not imagined the idea. She had read it in his own words six months ago.

Which brings me to the part of this that nobody on either side wants to talk about. Whether or not Carlson is right about this week, the decision he describes belongs to one man. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, and Congress has declared nothing. This war was started in February on the President’s say-so, has been run for eight months on his say-so, and by every report will be restarted, or not, on his say-so. Under the rules we have lived with since the 1950s, the President alone can order the use of nuclear weapons. No vote, no second signature, no one in the chain of command with a lawful right to refuse except on the question of whether the order is lawful in the first place. The Founders gave the power of war to Congress precisely because they did not trust one man with it. We have given one man the power to end the world, and we were content to leave it with him as long as we liked the man.

That should concern everybody now, and more than usual. On Tuesday the voters took the House and the Senate away from the President’s party, but the new Congress doesn’t sit until January. For the next two months we have a President who has just been repudiated at the polls, who has nothing more to lose at the ballot box, and who is surrounded, if Carlson is right, by men who think the war should be finished by force. A lame duck with sole command of the arsenal and a foreign prime minister on the phone every day to remind him what is in the Epstein Files is not a situation the Founders imagined. The outgoing Congress could still insist, today, that no further attack on Iran be made without its authority, and that no nuclear weapon be used against a country that has none. It won’t, of course. It has not insisted on anything since February.

So here is where I come out. I don’t know whether Tucker Carlson is right about this weekend, and neither does anyone who hasn’t sat in the room. I think the odds are against it. Trump has said no more than once, the experts I trust think it unlikely, and there are a dozen ugly conventional options to try before the unthinkable one. But Carlson was right to say it out loud. A government that has lied its way through eight months of this war, promised victory in days and then in weeks, and told us the program was obliterated before telling us it had to be obliterated again, has no standing to complain when people stop taking its word for things. The men calling Carlson a fearmonger ought to ask themselves why the fear spread so fast. It spread because nobody believes anything the administration says about this war any longer, and on Tuesday the voters said as much.

The schoolteacher checked out this morning. She asked me again, on her way to the car, whether I thought it would happen. I said I didn’t think so. Then I said that I hadn’t thought he would start the war in the first place, or threaten to blow up a whole country’s power plants, or lose the Senate in Kansas, and she gave me the look a teacher gives a boy who has answered a different question from the one she asked. She was right. The honest answer is that it depends on one man, and that is the whole trouble.

Sources