Iran’s New Space Rocket Could Double As A Nuclear Missile

Iran has a big new rocket. And it could complicate efforts by the Biden administration to slow or reverse Iran’s work on nuclear weapons.

The Iranian regime on Monday announced it had test-launched, for the first time, its Zuljanah space launch vehicle.

“The test helped Iran to achieve its most powerful rocket engine,” Ahmad Hosseini, a spokesperson for the defense ministry in Tehran, told state media.

Zuljanah is an 84-foot, three-stage rocket with a solid-fuel engine in its first and second stages and a liquid-fuel engine in its third stage. The rocket can loft a 500-pound payload as high as 310 miles, according to the Iranian government.

That’s adequate to place a satellite in low-Earth orbit and, for Iran, a big step forward for both its space program and its effort to develop delivery vehicles for possible future nuclear warheads.

A sold-fuel engine is more flexible and, because it requires less support equipment, easier to conceal than a liquid-fuel rocket is. But it requirements precise chemistry, engineering and manufacturing. “Making large solid-propellant motors is hard,” tweeted Jeffrey Lewis, an arms-control expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California.

Rocket in hand, Tehran now can advance both its space program and its nuclear-weapons program. Bear in mind that the very first space-launch vehicle was a version of the very first large, front-line ballistic missile—Nazi Germany’s V-2.

If you bent the Zuljanah’s trajectory, aiming for distance rather than height, you could carry a one-ton warhead as far as 3,100 miles, Lewis estimated. A weaponized Zuljanah could strike targets as far away as China and the United Kingdom.

The development adds tension to the already-fraught relations between the United States and Iran.

The administration of former President Barack Obama in 2015 negotiated an agreement—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—that capped Iran’s nuclear-weapons development in exchange for relief from economic sanctions.

Then in 2018, Obama’s successor Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the deal. Trump’s move was part of a broader assault on Obama’s diplomatic legacy and also reflected a deeply-ingrained opposition within Trump’s Republican Party to any international relations based on compromise.

As the JCPAO unraveled, Iran resumed work on the basic components of a nuclear warhead. Tehran’s rockets have advanced in parallel. If Iran ever finishes its nuke, it already will have a missile capable of delivering it across much of the world.

It’s up to the Biden administration to put the genie back in the bottle. But that’s easier said than done.

President Joe Biden already has signaled the United States will rejoin the JCPOA. “We would like to make sure that we reestablish some of the parameters and constraints around the program that have fallen away over the course of the past two years,” said Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor.

But the 2015 agreement only covers warheads, not missiles. To constrain Iran’s rocketry, Biden will need to cut an entirely new deal.

A regional approach involving Iran’s closest neighbors is wisest, said Kelsey Davenport, a nuclear expert with the Arms Control Association in Washington, D.C. “Once the [2015] deal is restored, Biden should pursue a longer-term nuclear framework and support a security dialogue that is led by states in the region.”

“I think it makes more sense to pursue missile limitations within that latter set of issues because Iran’s missiles are a regional threat,” Davenport added. “There are a number of restrictions that could be explored, including limits on range, fuel type, or number of launchers.”