Ballistic Missiles

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.

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.

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.