PolitiFact:
Everyone’s been talking about the potential nuclear deal with Iran. Largely absent in the discussion, however, is the question of whether Iran could actually aim one at the United States’ homeland. During a recent gathering of potential Republican presidential candidates in in New Hampshire, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., took that issue head-on.
“Iran is developing long-range rockets that will at some point in less than a decade be capable of reaching the East Coast of the United States,” Rubio said at the New Hampshire Republican Party Leadership Summit in Nashua, N.H., on April 17, 2015.
We wondered whether Rubio’s rather alarming projection was supported by publicly available evidence. We decided that we couldn’t put it to the Truth-O-Meter because it depends on intelligence we don’t have access to, and because it involves a prediction — a type of claim PolitiFact doesn’t rate.
However, in discussions with experts, we found that the scenario Rubio laid out is plausible, if also far from a certainty. (Rubio’s staff did not return an inquiry for this story.)
To threaten the United States mainland, Iran would need a missile capable of carrying a payload of several hundred kilograms for 9,000 kilometers, according to Greg Thielmann, a former aide on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence who is now at the Arms Control Association, who has written on the issue. (For a sense of comparison, the shortest distance for an ICBM to travel between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War was 5,500 kilometers.) Thielmann calls this 9,000-kilometer threshold “a daunting technological challenge.”
Officially, the Iranian government has said it is not interested in developing an ICBM. But many in the West are as skeptical of that claim as they are of Iran’s similar claim about nuclear weapons.
Indeed, Thielmann writes that Iran’s space program could easily morph into a weapons program: “Iran has outlined ambitious plans for building space launch vehicles to send satellites and astronauts into space. Iran’s space program is a proliferation concern because there is considerable overlap between developing (space launch vehicles) and ballistic missiles. The problem is further aggravated when space programs are run by the military, as is the case in Iran.”
We can’t tell what’s in the minds of Iran’s leaders, of course. “They do not appear to be actively developing anything at ranges that could reach the United States, but that could change,” said Matthew Bunn, an arms-control specialist at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
But let’s assume that Iran does want to build a workable ICBM. Could it do so “in less than a decade,” as Rubio says? It would have a decent chance, experts say…
