Iran on Wednesday denied Donald Trump's claim that it is building missiles that “could soon reach the US”, even as one expert called them “broadly true”.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei described the US President's remarks, made during the his State of the Union address, as “big lies”.
“'Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth' is a law of propaganda coined by Nazi Joseph Goebbels. This is now systematically used by the US administration,” said Mr Baghaei.
“Whatever they're alleging in regards to Iran's nuclear programme, Iran's ballistic missiles and the number of casualties during January's unrest is simply the repetition of 'big lies',” Mr Baghaei said.
Despite continuing negotiations between Washington and Tehran, the two sides continue to trade threats of war amid rising tensions and fears of military escalation.
In his address on Tuesday night, Mr Trump said he “will never allow” Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon. He said his preference was to solve the dispute “through diplomacy”, but that US negotiators have yet to hear “those secret words: we will never have a nuclear weapon”. A third round of negotiations is due to take place in Geneva on Thursday.
“They’ve already developed missiles that can threaten Europe and our bases overseas, and they’re working to build missiles that will soon reach the US,” said Mr Trump in his speech, which lasted one hour and 45 minutes.
“They were warned to make no future attempts to rebuild their weapons programme, in particular nuclear weapons … They want to start all over again and are at this moment pursuing their sinister ambitions,” he continued, without offering evidence.
Space rocket conversion
Defence experts have told The National that Mr Trump's claim that Iran could hit the US with a nuclear-tipped missile is “broadly true”, if Tehran used its space rocket programme.
The country’s Safir satellite launch vehicle could be converted for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and fitted with a nuclear payload, suggested Dr Sidharth Kaushal, a missile expert at the Rusi think tank.
With its space launch capability, it would be able to achieve the 10,000km range needed to get from Tehran to Washington.
“It's always been an assumption that Iran’s space programme had a dual-use function and that the Safir was effectively a stalking horse for an ICBM capability,” Dr Kaushal said.
“The ability to build an ICBM with that kind of range is not the most technologically sophisticated thing in the world. The North Koreans have done it and the Iranians have a lot of the underlying infrastructure in terms of their military industrial base.”
The project would be made easier by the weapon not needing to have a high degree of accuracy, because “when delivering a WMD [weapon of mass destruction] payload, accuracy is less of a premium”, said Dr Kaushal. “You can accept very big error margins at that point.” The projectile would probably be accurate to within a kilometre and similar to North Korea’s liquid-fuelled Hwasong ICBM missile system.
“It would certainly not be beyond Iran’s capabilities, so Mr Trump’s claim is broadly speaking true,” he added. However, according to a US Defence Intelligence Agency report last year, while Iran does have the potential to develop an ICBM, this would not be achieved until 2035 if Tehran had decided to do it in 2025.
Its rocket engineers would have to develop a re-entry vehicle as well as fit a viable nuclear warhead and guidance systems to strike the US that could also act as a significant deterrence to American attacks. It is also unlikely that this programme was impacted during the air strikes in the 12-day war last June, as it was not relevant to Israel’s war aims.
Currently, Iran’s biggest missiles are the Khorramshahr-4, Ghadr-110 and Sejjil, which have a maximum range of 3,000km, several of which were used to strike Israel last year, causing considerable damage.
Mr Trump also repeated claims that US forces “obliterated” Iran's nuclear capabilities with last year's strikes, something widely doubted.
Tehran denies seeking to develop nuclear weapons and insists it wants to preserve uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes. It has said it could agree to dilute its production if sanctions are eased
