Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities are a growing threat to Europe

Politico _July 4th2023

BY BEHNAM BEN TALEBLU

Behnam Ben Taleblu is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He is the author of “Arsenal: Assessing the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Ballistic Missile Program.”

As Europe struggles to combat Iran’s drone proliferation to Russia for use against Ukraine, it can ill afford to ignore improvements to an even greater unmanned aerial threat that may soon land on its doorstep: the country’s ballistic missile arsenal — the largest in the Middle East.

While Iran’s much reported potential transfer of short-range ballistic missiles to Russia is yet to materialize, the causal force behind this is likely not Tehran’s fear of transgressing some unwritten agreement that’s being secretly negotiated with Washington. Instead, the Islamic Republic may well be waiting for the termination of U.N. prohibitions on ballistic missile testing and transfers this October, before further arming Moscow with precision-strike systems.

In fact, Iran may even want the move to be deemed “licit” to prevent any predicate for renewed pressure — but in the interim, it has not been idle.

In late May, Iran launched a new ballistic missile simultaneously dubbed the “Khorramshahr-4” and the “Khaybar.” While the former name commemorates an Iranian city liberated during the Iran-Iraq War — a conflict that birthed the revolutionary regime’s interest in missiles as a supplement for airpower — the latter name comes from a Jewish stronghold in Arabia that was overrun by the Prophet Muhammad’s armies 14 centuries ago, a salient event for Iran’s current revolutionary leaders who seek Israel’s destruction.

The missile itself is based on an Iranian variant of a North Korean nuclear-capable platform known as the Musudan — a useful reminder of the long-standing military and missile cooperation between the two rogue regimes. Since receiving the Musudan in the mid-2000s, Iran has refined the weapon, developing a variant with a lighter warhead that could travel up to 3,000 kilometers — a move that, in effect, took it from being able to target parts of Southern Europe to potentially being able to strike nearly all of Central Europe. Naturally, the development prompted the United Kingdom, France and Germany to raise concerns at the U.N. in 2019.

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