More on the the IISS Iranian Missile Dossier

I was going to announce the IISS dossier on Iran’s Ballistic Missile Capabilities: A Net Assessment, but Geoff beat me to it.

Nevertheless, I cannot resist, because I am in the dossier.

And I mean that literally. On page 131. Standing next to a DF-2.

The picture atop this post also appears in the dossier, with the caption:

Chinese DF-2 missile with empty re-entry vehicle, at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 13 April 2004. The design of the nuclear warhead for the re-entry vehicle was provided to Pakistan and then, by the A.Q. Khan network, to Libya. (Courtesy of Jeffrey Lewis, featured in photo to show relative size of the display.)

I always thought I brought a sense of proportion to technical discussions about Iran’s ballistic missiles, but not in quite this way.

5’11” for those of you calculating from home.

I should note that Jonathan McDowell took the picture when we visited the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2004 for a symposium organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists. That picture, along with a few others, turned out to be very useful in providing an open source estimate of the size and mass of the Chinese nuclear weapons design that ended up in Pakistan (and then Libya), as well as some informed speculation about the state-of-the-art in Pakistan and Iran.