Iran's Ballistic Missile Program is Threatening even Without its WMD Ambitions

Indeed, Iran's missile programme has reached an unprecedented level of sophistication and size for a proliferant country. Tehran is reported to possess a tactical arsenal comprising several hundred Shahab-1 and Shahab-2 missiles14-equivalent to Scud-B and Scud-C. The quest for longer-range systems reportedly started at the beginning of the 1990s with support from the DPRK. The first flight test of the 1,300km-range Shahab-3 in 1998 started a long series of tests and the official deployment of the missile in 2003.16 With such a missile Tehran gains the ability to threaten Israel as well as part of Europe. Iran has also conducted the development of modern anti-ship cruise missiles, culminating with the announcement from Tehran of the deployment of a Raad anti-ship cruise missile in 2004. Furthermore, Iran allegedly illegally acquired six AS-15 missiles from Ukraine in 2001. The transfer was revealed by Hryhoriy Omelchenko, member of the Ukrainian parliament, in February 2005, and since then has been the subject of a legal investigation in Ukraine. According to this investigation, intermediaries of the operation-including a Russian national employed by the Oboronexport weapons export company- apparently used false end-user certificates to circumvent Ukrainian export control regulations. This missile, with a theoretical range of 2,500km, was apparently part of a batch of Soviet missiles for which the nuclear warheads had been returned to Moscow as part of a bilateral agreement in the middle of the 1990s. It would seem realistic to believe that Tehran has attempted to copy the received missiles since the sale, particularly the propulsion and navigation systems. On the other hand, considering information available about the state of the missiles as received by Iran and the relative inexperience of military units in the use of ground attack missiles, it seems improbable that they were immediately deployed.