December 26-2014
While most media attention has been focused on Iran’s nuclear developments, US officials are equally as concernead about Iran’s missile progress.
There are two issues. First, Iran needs a large missile, which it does not have, if it is to deliver a nuclear weapon over any great distance. And, second, if Iran does develop a large missile able to go to great range, its only utility would be to deliver a nuclear bomb.
Consequently, the United States wants to see Iran’s missile program severely crimped.
The Islamic Republic says its missile program is zipping along at great speed and that Iran is now the Number Four missile power in the world.
But an American missile specialist last week said Iran’s program is largely stymied, primarily by Western sanctions.
Iranian Defense Minister Hossain Dehqan last week claimed Iran was now the world’s fourth missile power, trailing only the United States, Russia and China. He said Iran was focusing on increasing missile range and accuracy and to make them stealthy or radar-evasive.
The reference to increasing range will not help relations with the West. Iranian military officers have bounced around on the range issue over the years, sometimes boasting of efforts to boast range, other times denying any interest in any further range increases, knowing that is seen as a threat in the West.
Iran now claims a range of 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles), enough to reach Israel. Some Iranian officials have said that is all Iran’s needs. But Dehqan said Saturday that Iran wants greater range.
A few days before Dehqan spoke, Michael Elleman, a missile specialist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London, told Al-Monitor in an interview December 16 that Iran is “a little bit behind where I thought they would be” in developing missiles with a range beyond 1,500 kilometers (930 miles), and has focused instead on trying to improve the accuracy and lethality of systems with a range of less than 250 kilometers (150 miles).
Elleman credited several factors in slowing Iran’s progress toward longer-range systems. Among them: international efforts to intercept key ingredients — such as aluminum powder for solid propellant fuel; the death in a 2011 explosion of the missile program’s architect, Maj. Gen. Hassan Tehrani-Moqaddam, and a dozen of his colleagues; and a likely Iranian desire to avoid provoking the international community by testing longer-range rockets.
But Defense Minister Dehqan did not appear to be on board with that last point.
Four years ago, Elleman had projected that the Iranians would be able to deploy the Sajjil-2, a two-stage, solid-fueled rocket with a maximum range of about 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles), by 2013. But the missile, which is produced using Chinese-supplied infrastructure and manufacturing equipment and has been under development for nearly a decade, has not been flight-tested since 2011.
In February 2010, to immense fanfare, Iran unveiled its Simorgh rocket. Almost five years have passed now, and there has been no announcement of even a single flight test of the Simorgh.
UN Security Council Resolution 1929, enacted in 2010, bars Iran from developing and testing “nuclear-capable” ballistic missiles. Even more than the sanctions themselves, however, the creation of a UN panel tasked with overseeing efforts to intercept missile parts and other related supplies has impeded advancement of the Sajjil-2, Elleman said.
“If there’s one [factor] that dominates, it’s the inconsistent supply of ingredients because of sanctions,” he told Al-Monitor. He said that Iran has had to scramble to get aluminum powder for solid fuel from different sources.
“There are always slight variations and then when they do testing, they can’t eliminate a variable which is the ingredients themselves,” he said. “It makes it very difficult to fully develop a large, complex system under those circumstances.”
Reports in the Iranian press assert that the country’s scientists are working on a four-stage solid-fuel rocket known as the Qaem, intended to be able to launch a satellite into an orbit 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) above Earth. The reports also refer to the system as a “deterrent,” suggesting that it has purposes well beyond civilian space launches.
Elleman noted that this rocket has not been flight-tested either.
But he questioned whether the Qaem even exists apart from press releases. “If they haven’t completed the development of the [smaller] Sajjil-2, why would they go to something much larger?” Elleman said.
The Sajjil, he noted, has a rocket engine that weighs 14 tons, while a four-stage system would require an engine of 24-to-30 tons. “That is a qualitative leap that has taken other countries eight to 12 years to master,” he said.
Elleman noted that no country has tried to develop an intermediate-range ballistic missile such as the Sajjil-2 without first having acquired nuclear weapons. “Seeking still-longer-range delivery vehicles only would increase existing doubts about Iran’s nuclear intentions,” Elleman wrote in an article for the Arms Control Association in 2012.
The logic is very simple. A missile with long range is very expensive. If it only carries a ton or two of conventional explosive, the damage it does will likely be repaired for less cost than the missile itself. Therefore, the logic says, you only build a long-range missile if you have a nuclear bomb to put on top of it.
So Dehqan’s talk about developing missiles with greater range doesn’t please officials in Europe and North America.
Elleman told Al-Monitor his “hunch” is that Iran has a longer-range missile based on the engine of a Nodong, a never-deployed North Korean missile. The Iranians may have “strapped on booster rockets for the first stage … to get extra lift capability,” he said. Iran has had a missile cooperation arrangement with North Korea since the 1980s.
Separating fact from fiction about Iran’s missile program has always been a challenge. The Iranian program has frequently been hyped in the past — and not only by Iranians. In 1998, a commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld — before he became defense secretary in 2001 — declared that Iran “now has the technical capability and resources to demonstrate an ICBM-range ballistic missile … within five years of a decision to proceed.” The US intelligence community at the time was saying Iran could not do that before 2015.
An ICBM (inter-continental ballistic missile) has a range in excess of 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) and can reach the United States.
Elleman pooh-poohed claims by Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, that Iran was close to acquiring such technology. Elleman said Iran could develop an operational ICBM no earlier than 2020.
But, Elleman said, Iran appears to be focused more on the “tactical benefits of [short-range] ballistic missiles as opposed to the strategic” benefits of having ICBMs. The Sajjil-2 and a one-stage missile, the Ghadr, which Iran has tested successfully, have sufficient range to hit Israel, which Iran hopes would deter an attack on its nuclear installations, he said.
Other operating missiles could threaten Arab capitals across the Persian Gulf. And shorter-range missiles such as the Fateh 110, whose accuracy Iran has been seeking to improve, could hit troops massing to invade Iran from Iraq or Kuwait.
Iran has said numerous times that it will not discuss its missile program in the ongoing nuclear talks. The United States has said Iran’s missiles are on the agenda.
But if missiles are not addressed in the talks, it is unlikely that the Big Six—including Russia and China—would agree to drop any of the sanctions that Elleman says have been effective in hobbling Iran’s missile program.
