Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a Washington-based think tank advocating restraint in U.S. foreign policy, said Iran currently lacks the technological ability to build an effective ICBM.
“If you’re building an ICBM, there’s lots of technical details behind it, but broadly speaking, you’ve got to be able to shoot something out of the atmosphere into low Earth orbit,” Kelanic told us in a phone interview. “Then you need to be able to have it reenter the atmosphere and not burn up on reentry, which is a different level of technological difficulty. There’s no evidence Iran can do that yet. And then you also have to be able to put a warhead on it … and the added difficulty that you need to miniaturize the warhead, to put it on a missile that would be capable of shooting that far out of the atmosphere and then coming back in and not burning up on reentry. Then you also have to do guidance systems to make sure it lands in the right place. And there’s no evidence that Iran can do that either.”
“So basically, the U.S. intelligence agencies have said that Iran would need 10 years to build ICBMs capable of hitting the United States militarily if they chose to do so,” Kelanic said. “And it did not necessarily say that there was evidence that Iran had chosen to do so. … To me, that doesn’t register as soon.”
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