Ballistic Missiles

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.

This, however, is the current situation, and what is of much greater concern to Israel, is Iran’s longer- term commitment to developing more powerful ballistic missiles, especially those using solid fuel, which have much more rapid pre-launch procedures. Iran already has extensive experience of casting solid fuel propellants for short-range missiles such as the Zelzal and Fateh-110, and in November 2008 a new and very much larger solid fuel two-stage missile, the Sajjil was test-fired. This is reported to have a range of 2,200 to 2,400 km and have a payload capacity broadly similar to the Ghadr-1. Since the first test-firing, there have been two more tests of the Sajjil, but there are no reliable reports that it has yet been deployed. From an Israeli perspective, apart from the solid fuel aspect, the main significance of the Sajjil development is that it appears to have been undertaken with a large element of indigenous Iranian capability. On present rates of progress, Iran may be capable of deploying numerous Sajjil missiles within five years.

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.

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.