Subterranean Warfare: Can Pickaxe Mountain Be Destroyed?

The next battlefield isn’t in the sky or at sea—it’s underground. The Islamic Republic, together with Hamas and Hezbollah, spent decades building a subterranean fortress: hundreds of miles of terror tunnels beneath Gaza and Lebanon, and deeply buried nuclear and missile facilities designed to survive even the most powerful airstrikes. At the center of that strategy is Pickaxe Mountain, where Tehran is constructing hardened underground infrastructure intended to shield its nuclear weapons program from U.S. and Israeli airpower. In this episode of The Iran Breakdown, host Mark Dubowitz sits down with Yadin Soffer, co-founder and CEO of Traysar, a startup developing autonomous systems for underground warfare. They explore how this emerging technology could detect, penetrate, and neutralize subterranean threats—and whether advances in underground warfare could change the strategic equation against deeply buried targets like Pickaxe Mountain.