Iran Has Bought Long-Range Missiles, Says Israel

Question: What is the purpose of the last line? Israel's agenda? Survival. Answer: What's wrong with that? Nothing.


Iran has bought long-range missiles, says Israel
David Fickling
Thursday April 27, 2006

Iran has obtained missiles from North Korea capable of delivering nuclear payloads to eastern Europe, according to Israel's military intelligence chief.

Major-General Amos Yadlin told a lecture of intelligence officials yesterday that Iran had unloaded BM-25 missiles purchased from North Korea, Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper reported.

The Soviet-manufactured weapon has a range of 1,500 miles, compared with a range of at least 1,250 miles for Iran's longest-range home-produced missile, the Shihab-4.

The BM-25 missiles would pose little threat to western European capitals, although a missile fired from northwestern Iran could potentially reach Istanbul and Kiev.

The news comes as Tehran faces a UN-imposed deadline to suspend its enrichment of uranium. The UN security council ordered Iran to stop enriching uranium by Friday, and the International Atomic Energy Agency is also due to publish a report into Iran's enrichment programme tomorrow.

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, was defiant in advance of the deadline, saying that his country would not give up "one bit" of its nuclear technology.

"The Iranian nation has acquired nuclear fuel production technology. It didn't get assistance from anybody, and nobody can take it back," he told thousands of people in western Iran today.

The US, France and Britain say that steps should be taken to enforce the UN resolution if Iran does not meet the deadline tomorrow, but the security council's other two permanent members, China and Russia, disagree.

Iran announced earlier this month that it had succeeded in enriching uranium to the level required for nuclear power generation.

The same technology can theoretically be used to make nuclear material suitable for use in atomic weapons, although analysts say such a programme could take decades.

Iran insists its nuclear programme is purely for civilian use, but most observers agree that President Ahmadinejad's government is trying to develop nuclear weapons. However, the state of the country's missile technology is considered a big flaw in its nuclear ambitions.

John Swenson-Wright, a North Korea expert at the foreign policy thinktank Chatham House, said that the sale of weapons to Iran would be consistent with North Korea's previous policy on weapons proliferation.

In the mid-1990s Pyongyang is thought to have assisted Pakistan in developing missile technology in return for nuclear centrifuge expertise, and in 2002 US officials intercepted a freighter in the Indian Ocean carrying 15 Scud missiles from North Korea to Yemen.

"It's quite consistent with past North Korean brinksmanship of finding a mechanism to tell the international community, 'We're still here and our interests need to be taken seriously,'" Mr Swenson-Wright said.

The German newspaper Bild reported in February that Iran had purchased 18 disassembled BM-25 missiles from North Korea, quoting a German government intelligence report. It said Tehran planned to extend the missiles' range to 2,200 miles, far enough to reach Berlin, Rome and Brussels.

However, Frank Barnaby, a proliferation expert at the Oxford Research Group, said that Iran was still a long way from posing any nuclear threat to its neighbours.

"I would not want to exaggerate the threat from this, and I think the Israelis have a very understandable agenda by which they do want to exaggerate it," he said.