Ballistic Missiles

Iran has the largest and most diverse ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East with at least a few capable of intermediate-range strikes, but has yet to develop a viable intercontinental ballistic missile that could hit the U.S.
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Iran successfully launched its most advanced satellite-carrying rocket into space, the country’s state media reported Thursday, in what is likely the most significant step yet for the launch vehicle.
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Iran now has long-range ballistic missiles with greater precision, its defense minister said on Thursday, rejecting reports that Tehran has halted its missile program after a recent missile launch that drew a response from Washington.
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Iran has gradually improved its offensive cyber abilities and developed more advanced ballistic missiles since signing an accord last year to curb its nuclear program, the U.S. Defense Department said. The Islamic Republic now has a “substantial inventory of missiles capable of reaching targets throughout the region, including U.S. military bases and Israel,” according to an unclassified summary from a Pentagon assessment of Iran’s military prowess.
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A top Treasury Department official argued against imposing new legislative sanctions on Iran after its ballistic missile tests last month, even as he said the Islamic Republic would remain blocked from the U.S. financial system.
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The U.S. Treasury Department blacklisted two Iranian companies on Thursday for supporting Iran's ballistic missile programme and also sanctioned two British businessmen it said were helping an airline used by the country's Revolutionary Guards.
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Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) test-fired several ballistic missiles from silos across the country on Tuesday, state television said, defying recent U.S. sanctions on its missile program.
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The author argues that Iran has legitimate defense motives for its ballistic missile program are are unlikely to be use them for nuclear weapons but agrees that they could be doing more to assuage regional concerns about their intent.
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Iran has carried out a new medium range ballistic missile test in breach of two United Nations Security Council resolutions, a senior U.S. official told Fox News on Monday.
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Russia's U.N. envoy on Thursday said the United Nations Security Council will examine the technical details of a ballistic missile test by Iran, which the United States and its European allies have said violated U.N. sanctions.
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House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) told President Obama on Wednesday that the United States must respond “with immediate action, both unilaterally and at the U.N. Security Council” against Iran after its recent test-firing of a ballistic missile
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Iran sees WMD and ballistic missiles as means to fill the void in military and deterrent capabilities. Tehran suffered under barrages of Iraqi ballistic missiles during the Iran-Iraq War and wants to have the option of using ballistic missiles that are faster and more reliable than Iran's air force for penetrating enemy airspaces to deliver both conventional and WMD warheads. In July 2003 Iran successfully tested the Shahab-3 missile, which achieved a range of about 1,000 km. Iran is suspected of having an unspecified number of operational Shahab missiles, which are based on North Korea's No Dong-1 missile that is reportedly capable of carrying an 800 kg warhead. Iran also is working on a 2,000-km Shahab-4 based on Russian technology, as well as a 5,000-km Shahab-5 missile. These missiles probably are too inaccurate to be of much military utility if armed with conventional warheads, but they would be sufficiently accurate to deliver WMD, particularly nuclear warheads. According to a foreign intelligence official and a former Iranian intelligence officer, the North Koreans are working on the Shahab-4 and providing assistance on designs for a nuclear warhead.
European governments are anxious about the possibility of Iran obtaining a nuclear capacity. They are not concerned that the arms may be used against them, although Iran's efforts to increase the range of the Shehab missiles to cover parts of Europe, or develop or purchase missiles with a range of 3,000-4,000 kilometers that cover all of Europe does arouse their concern that Iran will try to use nuclear extortion against them as a bargaining chip. They do not have an alternative explanation for the increase in the missile range. Yet for the European governments, the fact that nuclear arms in Iranian hands will upset the stability of the Middle East is of no less importance. The specificthreatto Israel, which might potentially lead to regional deterioration, joins the possibility of a more aggressive Iran and a more radical Middle East. A nuclear Iran may also spur an acceleration in the regional arms race, with Turkey being one of the prime potential participants. Most of Turkey is already within the range of Shehab-3 missiles. This would further heighten tensions in NATO, and the arms control regime would suffer considerably.
There is still much more for Iran to do For one thing, they would have to be developing the production line for the much larger diameter first stage. They could, of course, have already started this using the trained manpower from the Nodong factory. This would mean, of course, that the Safir development might be slowed down unless they recycled deployed Shahabs as first stages for the Safir in the rest of its development flights. These are all part of the program risks associated with concurrent development and production. For an excellent discussion of these problems in US weapon system development, see the CBO paper “Concurrent Weapons Development and Production” (1988) by my friend Wayne Glass.I think even eight years sounds optimistic considering Iran’s knownstate of development but even that would be considerably longer than Obering’s 2015. And a more realistic estimate might be sometime beyond 2020 and that assumes that Iran has made the strategic decision todevelop an ICBM capability; something that is not a logical consequenceof the Safir space launch vehicle development.
The history of truly indigenous ballistic missile development programs shows that every new phase of development requires tremendous intellectual and material efforts and many years to achieve results. The development and production of modern ballistic missiles requires an advanced R&D and industrial infrastructure, which in turn depends directly on the general level of a country's scientific, technological, and industrial resources. More specifically, it requires: access to the world market for high-tech equipment, materials, and components; a general, diverse, and specialized system of educational, research, and training institutions; a highly developed R&D and industrial base; and a suffi ciently large force of highly qualified and skilled scientists, engineers, and industrial workers.
The leading missile countries have hundreds of research organizations and industrial enterprises cooperating in the development and manufacture of ballistic missiles. In Russia, for example, hundreds of entities participate in production of the "Topol" ICBM. The total number of employees in the Chinese missile and space industry exceeds 200,000, even though China has rather modest achievements in missile technologies compared with the United States and Russia. Iran does not have such an infrastructure; neither do North Korea or Pakistan.
The major scientific, technological and production problems that have to be solved in building an IRBM or an ICBM are as follows:
- a. The development of powerful rocket motors;
- b. Flight control, guidance systems, and telemetry;
- c. Reentry vehicle heat protection;
- d. Construction materials;
- e. Flight testing.
Each of these areas would pose major scientific, technological, and production problems for Iran.
Second, Iran works very closely with North Korea on its nuclear and missile programs. Consequently, it has the ballistic missile capacity to launch weapons of substantial size and intercontinental range against us, or to orbit satellites above us.
So troubling is this capability — in the hands of either Iran or North Korea — that nine years ago, based on the ability of North Korea’s Taepodong missile to carry a nuclear warhead to intercontinental range, the current secretary of defense, Ashton Carter, and a prominent former secretary, William Perry, urged in a 2006 oped a pre-emptive strike against the then-new North Korean long-range missiles on their launch pads. As the two secretaries put it then, “Intervening before mortal threats to U.S. security can develop is surely a prudent policy.” Their view was that our ballistic missile defense capabilities were unproven and should not be relied upon for such an important task. “Diplomacy has failed,” they said, “And we cannot sit by.”
Iran steadfastly continues to deny that it has or has ever had any desire to obtain nuclear weapons, notwithstanding prior shenanigans with inspections, data, secret facilities and so forth. Rather, the Iranian regime claims that it wishes to retain significant nuclear enrichment capabilities for entirely peaceful and legitimate energy production needs. Well then: do the missiles tell a different story?
After more than a quarter century of unrelenting effort, Iran now boasts by far the largest and most multifarious missile arsenal in the Middle East [10] and is dauntlessly working to expand these already formidable capabilities in terms of range, accuracy, and survivability. At the same time, Tehran appears recently to have abandoned any pretext that its muscular missile programs might be related to innocent space launch ambitions [11] (which had always been a dubious fig-leaf, lacking any credible economic or geospatial logic). Put simply, the scale and nature of its wide ranging ballistic missile programs has long belied Iranian protestations of peaceful nuclear intentions. If the Iranians refuse to abandon or even curtail these programs as part of a larger nuclear framework arrangement, and with no plausible answer for why they would still need these capabilities if not to deliver nuclear weapons, it speaks volumes about their ultimate goals. If the United States and its negotiating partners have demurred from putting Iranian intentions to this test, then that also speaks volumes. We have seen this movie before (as have the Iranians), when the Agreed Framework that the Clinton administration negotiated with North Korea in the 1990s tried to resolve concerns about a suspected covert nuclear weapons program while deferring any restrictions on overt missile programs. As it turned out, both continued apace. Contrast this to the experience of sincerely repentant nuclear proliferators like South Africa and Libya, which renounced nuclear weapons and their associated missiles in tandem.
Finally, missile restrictions would slow down Iran’s capacity quickly to field capable offensive nuclear forces in the event that it ever reneges on an agreement or merely waits out any time-limited provisions. In terms of such “breakout” potential, one of the gravest concerns about any agreement allowing the Iranians to preserve a robust nuclear reprocessing capability is that, without even needing to cheat, it could allow Iran to tiptoe up to nuclear weapons threshold status. In other words, as long as Iran is allowed to maintain an enrichment program for peaceful purposes, it will retain a latent capability that could quickly be put to use to produce weapons. Once the centrifuges start spinning to enrich nuclear fuel to weapons grade, it is simply a matter of time, more or less, depending on the number of centrifuges.
As the North Korean case shows, it is easier to develop nuclear explosives than reliable long range missiles capable of delivering them. Whereas the North Koreans have conducted successful nuclear explosives tests (albeit with mixed results), they have not yet mastered an intercontinental missile capable of hitting the continental United States, nor the ability to deliver a nuclear warhead on any range missile. Iran likewise is still pursuing long range missile capabilities and has yet to develop missiles that can hit the United States or even Western Europe [12]. A ban on any further Iranian development, testing, and production of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles would lengthen the timeline between an Iranian decision to renounce an agreement and its ability to deploy nuclear armed missiles, in particular any that could threaten the United States and its key allies outside of the Middle East.
Missiles also matter for verification. Covert nuclear weapons programs are relatively easy to hide even when inspection mechanisms exist. Consequently, effective verification of nuclear nonproliferation agreements requires highly intrusive protocols that in the event still may not provide a high degree of confidence that cheating will always be detected in time. This reality has been repeatedly demonstrated over the past few decades. Iraq successfully pursued an extensive covert nuclear weapons program during the 1980s despite being subject to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections, until it was revealed in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. Iran likewise successfully hid covert nuclear facilities in the 1990s and early 2000s, again under the noses of IAEA inspectors, until these facilities were revealed by exile opposition groups. In the late 2000s it was Syria’s turn to hide a covert nuclear weapons facility from the IAEA, until Israel bombed it to the world’s attention. In this context, over a decade of Iranian experience playing skillful cat-and-mouse games with the IAEA does not inspire a great deal of faith in the prospects for effectively verifying any P5+1 arrangements through cooperative verification measures.
By contrast, medium and long range ballistic missile programs are relatively easy to detect at stages of development and testing that occur well before operational deployment, using only national technical means (NTM) that require no good faith cooperation. Existing deployed missiles and related infrastructure are rather large and distinctive and therefore likewise difficult to hide from NTM in any significant numbers. Add cooperative verification mechanisms to the mix, such as inspections and/or bans on unsupervised flight or static testing, and very high confidence is possible that any cheating can be detected. Indeed, it is important to recall that the successful nuclear disarmament treaties between distrustful Cold War adversaries, embodying President Reagan’s “trust but verify” maxim, did not actually limit nuclear weapons as such. Instead, for the sake of simplifying reliable verification, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (START) covered delivery systems (that is, missiles and bombers) rather than the warheads they carried. Using this same proven approach, by including missile restrictions as part of any nuclear deal with Iran, would greatly simplify verification challenges in detecting and demonstrating any cheating down the road.
In the coming days, we will learn if the Obama administration and its negotiating partners are able to close a nuclear deal with Iran on a framework for a comprehensive settlement and on which terms. If so, then the fundamental question to assess is whether this development reflects a strategic decision by the Islamic Republic to forswear nuclear weapons now and for the foreseeable future, or if instead it is nothing more than a tactical accommodation on the road to becoming a nuclear weapons power. If the Iranians are sincere in renouncing any past nuclear weapons ambitions, then they should have no reason to retain their formidable existing arsenal of missiles, and certainly even less so to pursue even longer range and more capable systems in the future. Thus, if it turns out that the Iranians have indeed not been required to restrict their missiles as part of a comprehensive deal, even while this arrangement purports to satisfy concerns about Iranian nuclear weapons development, then it begs the obvious question of why they would still have any need for such missiles? What a pity if they are not even asked to explain this paradox.
MYTH: Iran is developing long-range ballistic missiles that could be armed with nuclear warheads.
REALITY: The U.S. intelligence community assess that Iran may be technically capable of developing an ICBM with sufficient foreign assistance, not that they are doing so. To date, Iran has never tested any long-range rockets. Iran's longest-range missiles (2,000 kilometers) are medium-range ballistic missiles, not intercontinental-range missiles, as some have suggested. Iran would need an ICBM with a range of over 9,000 kilometers to reach the United States. Experts assess that even if Iran makes a concerted effort, deploying such a missile within the decade is unlikely. Additionally, if a comprehensive nuclear deal blocks Iran's potential pathways to a bomb, its ballistic missiles become less of a threat, because they cannot be armed with a nuclear weapon.
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Iran already possesses a missile arsenal that is capable of attacking its neighbors and parts of Europe. Iran’s missile arsenal is growing both in numbers and sophistication and they are at work at a long-range intercontinental missile.
- Iran working on building up ballistic missile arsenal
- Europe concerned about Iranian missiles and Turkish proliferation
- Iranian has hundreds of intermediate range missiles capable of attacking Europe
- Short and Medium Range Ballistic Missiles can be Highly Effective even against Missile Defense
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- Sanctions appear to have disrupted Iran's development of a solid-propellant long-range ballistic missile
- Iran does not have capacity to develop reliable liquid-fueled long-range ballistic missiles and sanctions are degrading their capacity further
- Iran Lacks the Necessary Technical and Social Infrastructure it Needs to Build Indigenous Ballistic Missile Program
- Realistic assessment for an Iranian ICBM based on their current capabilities is sometime after 2020
- Iran has not developed an ICBM capable of hitting the U.S.
- Iran has apparently halted its development of the solid-propellant ballistic missile Sajjil-2 to avoid further international sanction