Qeshm Proves the Iran War Never Ended, and the Nuclear Threat Is Real

Picture a man on his balcony telling the street that the quarrel with his neighbour is over. They have made up, he says, so nobody needs to gather under the building. Behind him, through the open door, chairs are still flying and something heavy is being smashed against the wall.

That is Washington’s Iran policy this week. On Monday, 2 November, Donald Trump told reporters: “We had a war with Iran. We won.” He added that “one way or the other, we will do something, but there is no rush.” Within hours, American jets were striking Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz.

So will Trump use a nuclear weapon on Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain by 7 November? No such decision has been announced. Trump himself said on 15 October, “I wouldn’t use nuclear.” But the American commentator Tucker Carlson says people close to the president expect him to decide by this weekend, and the strike on Qeshm shows how quickly this war can flare up again. The Iran War never ended, and the nuclear warning deserves to be taken seriously.

• The US strikes on Qeshm Island on 2 November prove the Iran war is still being fought, whatever Washington says in public. US officials called the strikes defensive after Iran fired a surface-to-air missile at an American jet.
• Tucker Carlson claims Trump will decide by about 7 November whether to use a nuclear weapon on Pickaxe Mountain, a site that may lie deeper than America’s largest conventional bomb can reach. The White House will not comment, and Israel denies pushing for it.
• Restarting the full war would be a dangerous gamble for the United States. Its interceptor stocks are badly depleted, and Iran, not Washington, will decide how long the next round lasts.

US officials said the Revolutionary Guards fired a surface-to-air missile from Qeshm at an American fighter over the Strait of Hormuz late on 2 November. The missile missed. American aircraft then struck the launcher and the air-defence sites around it. One US official called it “a defensive measure for Iranians using surface-to-air missiles against US assets”, and officials stressed that “the airstrikes do not signal the resumption of major combat operations against Iran.”

It was not a pinprick. Iranian state media reported at least five explosions on the island, residents of Hengam and Bandar Abbas reported hearing them, and blasts were also heard from the sea off Bandar Lengeh. The Revolutionary Guards said they had brought down two American reconnaissance drones south of Qeshm with electronic warfare and destroyed an MQ-9 Reaper east of the strait. US officials said Monday’s raid was one of a series of limited strikes carried out without announcement in recent weeks. We covered the first hours in our report on the Qeshm explosions.

Qeshm has paid before. On 30 July a US strike flattened a house in Qeshm City, and Iranian officials said it killed a taxi driver, Qaisar Jafari, his wife Zahra and their two-year-old son, Sina. No casualties had been reported from Monday’s strikes by the time of publication.

The island matters because of where it sits. Qeshm is the largest island in the Gulf and lies across the shipping lanes of the Strait of Hormuz. It holds an underground missile base, a naval base and a major desalination plant, and Iran has been rebuilding radar sites there to help it close the strait. Most of those radars are Russian or Chinese designs, even when Iran assembles them at home.

Carlson wrote over the weekend that “close observers say Trump is likely to decide by next weekend whether or not to use nuclear weapons”, which points to 7 November. Quoting “an informed observer”, he added: “Bibi calls Trump about it every day.” His argument is that Israeli intelligence believes Iran has restarted enrichment inside Pickaxe Mountain, that “no conventional weapon in the American arsenal can penetrate 300 feet of solid granite”, and that the only military option left would therefore be nuclear. He warned that after a first nuclear strike, “World War Three is inevitable.”

Trump has kept the target in view. At Mar-a-Lago on Saturday he said the United States still had “one or two sites” to deal with, that “we can do that in 10 minutes”, and that “you probably could look at Pickaxe Mountain”. In a television interview aired late on Monday he said: “We might have to go after Pickaxe, but that’s not a big deal.” He did not say what weapons he had in mind. A White House official said the administration does not comment on “sensitive military plans that may or may not exist”, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said no decision on new strikes had been made. Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, said that “Prime Minister Netanyahu is not pressing President Trump” and called talk of a nuclear strike “delusional”.

Carlson is not a man who invents things for attention. He is one of the most influential voices in American politics, he has sources inside Trump’s circle, and what he says travels well beyond the United States. When he puts a date on a nuclear decision, it should be treated as a warning, not as noise. The Arab world cannot prepare for that scenario the way distant governments can. If a nuclear weapon is used on Iran, the countries around it will live with the consequences, and there is nothing to stockpile against that.

Pickaxe Mountain, Kuh-e Kolang Gaz La in Persian, is a tunnel complex being dug into a mountain just south of Iran’s Natanz enrichment plant, about 225 kilometres south of Tehran. Iran began the project after a series of sabotage attacks on Natanz, including one that destroyed a centrifuge assembly building in 2020. Tehran says the site is for building centrifuges. Western governments suspect it could also house an undeclared enrichment hall, and Israeli intelligence says thousands of centrifuges have been moved into its tunnels.

Nonproliferation experts estimated in 2023 that the halls lie 80 to 100 metres underground, and digging has continued since. The US military says its largest conventional bunker buster, the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, can reach at least 60 metres. That gap is why the site survived the June 2025 strikes on Fordow and Natanz and has not been hit in the current war. The International Atomic Energy Agency said on 23 June 2026 that Iran still refuses its inspectors access, so nobody outside Iran knows what is inside. In July Trump said the United States would hit the area “probably pretty soon”. For our earlier analysis of the post-election strike plans, see Will Trump hit Iran after the midterms?.

There is no decisive winner in this war. Do not mistake Iran for a power that has come through untouched. It has been hit by the strongest military in the world, its losses are heavy and largely hidden from view, and that silence is part of how it holds on. America has not swept Iran away either, because Russia and China are helping Tehran. Each side wants diplomacy, and each wants to avoid walking away with a losing deal. Trump would be delighted to win a deal like Barack Obama’s 2015 agreement, which capped enrichment at 3.67 percent. Iran, which now regards itself as a nuclear power, is unlikely to accept that.

The people paying the bill are the Arabs. The Gulf states sit in the line of fire, and Egypt has been pushed into wartime austerity, with fuel price rises and slowed state projects to cope with the shock. Israel, which pushed hardest for this war and is pressing for its return, is counting coalition seats while its neighbours count the cost. Watch 7 November. Whatever Washington says from the balcony, the war inside is still going on.