The Khorramshahr: BM-25 Musudan in Iran

Scott LaFoy 0:02

As of today, we are officially putting Iran on notice.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:16

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog, and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Scott 0:31

And I am Scott LaFoy, producer at the Arms Control Wonk Podcast and a master's candidate at the Georgetown University Center for Security Studies.

Jeffrey 0:40

It's raining here today.

Scott 0:41

What's it like in D.C.? It's a little cloudy, but mainly just depressing.

Jeffrey 0:45

I mean, it's emotionally overcast.

Scott 0:49

Yeah.

Jeffrey 0:50

Yes. Well, we've got some Iranian missiles to talk about. You want to talk about Iranian missiles?

Scott 0:57

I love talking about Iranian missiles, especially when they may be North Korean missiles.

Jeffrey 1:02

Yeah. So what was that thing?

Scott 1:09

I mean, you know what I think it was. I do know what you think it was, and I don't know, because we're going to have to talk about confidences and the analytic process a little bit, figuring it out. Yeah. This is weird.

Jeffrey 1:22

So, for listeners... Not recently. Probably last Sunday. I don't know when this episode will drop. So maybe it'll be a week ago Sunday by the time this episode drops. We're recording this on Friday morning. So the last Sunday in January. That's the phrase I'm looking for. It seems that Iran conducted a test of a medium-range ballistic missile, and there were two reports.

One was a U.S. official speaking to Reuters. And that official said that the missile was launched from Semnon, which is a known missile test site, and said that it was on Sunday and that it flew about 1,000 kilometers before exploding while reentering.

Scott 2:14

Right.

Jeffrey 2:15

And what was interesting about this is the official said that this was the same type of missile that had been tested in July 2016.

Scott 2:24

Which gives us a bit of a timeline to work with for figuring out what it was.

Jeffrey 2:29

Kind of. Right. And now this is interesting. So in July 2016, Lucas Tomlinson at Fox News, who actually I think is a really good reporter. I mean, normally we make fun of Fox News, but like whatever. He knows what he's doing. He got multiple intelligence officials to confirm that the July 2016 test was a variant of the Musudan.

Scott 2:58

Right, which is reported, if anyone's keeping up with the Fox reports, I believe they usually report that as a BM-25.

Jeffrey 3:04

Yeah, we can talk about nomenclature in a second.

Scott 3:07

I hope we do. Do you know where BM-25 comes from? I think I read a blog post that you wrote about it, so I think I'm just regurgitating your stuff back.

Jeffrey 3:15

Oh, no, that's confirmation bias or what is that? That's a self-licking ice cream cone. Echo chamber.

Scott 3:21

At least we're acknowledging it. BM-25 is, I think, the only designation for it that I haven't personally found good documentation for. So I have to take your word on that one.

Jeffrey 3:32

So we'll talk about all the names, but the short version is one version of this story is Reuters gets an official to tell them that the missile that was tested on the last Sunday in January was the same type that was tested in July. And that missile, a different reporter had previously described as a variant of North Korea's Musudan ballistic missile.

So that's one version. But there's this other interesting thing. So, you know, one like obvious question is like, hey. How come Lucas Tomlinson didn't get the story this time? Right. But he did. I think he just didn't beat Reuters to it, but he got, yeah, he got a different or slightly different version of events.

Scott 4:21

Okay, so give me a rundown. What's the difference between the two?

Jeffrey 4:25

So same launch location, Semnon. Right. But he gets a little bit more detail. I shouldn't say different. Sometimes he gets more detail. Sometimes it's different. It's not that much different. He says it's a well-known test site outside of Semnon. So that means it's the site that we all call Semnon, right? Right. It means it's not someplace weird.

And so we can now start working with our friends at Planet Labs to see if we can find any burn scars or what have you. So that's one thing. And the second thing is he gets a name. That's right.

Scott 5:06

He gets a new designation. Yeah, Khorramshahr? Khorramshahr?

Jeffrey 5:13

So you know that's a battle, or as I was told on Twitter by a colleague, a series of battles. So it's like an Iranian Revolutionary, or not Revolutionary, Iran-Iraq War reference.

Scott 5:26

I did not know that. I thought it was a town. Well, it is a town. Oh, is that where the battle comes? Okay, that makes sense.

Jeffrey 5:33

Right. But this adds confusion because when we talk about nomenclature, in the United States, we tend to name missiles after the nearest populated place.

Scott 5:40

Uh-huh. Oh, no. So that is going to be complicated for people.

Jeffrey 5:45

But in this case, the place named missile. So normally when a missile is place named, that's an American name, right? Like the Musudan, for example. Like, well, why is it called the Musudan? Because we saw it near the village of Musudan, right? The Taipodong. Why is that the Taipodong? Because it's... Actually, sometimes it's not always saw. Sometimes I should say it's tested, right?

So No Dong, Taepo Dong, Dong is a Village, and Musudan are all around the test site that the North Koreans no longer use. But anyway, Khorramshahr, in this case, you would think... Would be a U.S. name because it's a place name, but actually it's the Iranian name for the missile. The Iranian defense minister in September, that's the only other time I've seen this term, Khorramshahr, used by the Iranians, said in September that Iran could start production of that missile in early 2017.

Scott 6:35

Right, and it was mentioned alongside, if I remember correctly, two other missiles, the Zolfakar, I think, and was it a Sajal variant is the third one?

Jeffrey 6:45

Yes, but I'm not looking at the story, so I might screw that up.

Scott 6:48

Okay. Well, it's two other missiles, one of which is possibly their subunitions short-range missile that Shmuel and I talked a bit about.

Jeffrey 6:57

And so the last thing Lucas Tomlinson has is that, you know, it was a failed test of a reentry vehicle. I mean, he got more granular detail, right? Right. So if we put all these things together, the Khorramshahr is the BM-25... Which is the export variant of the missile that North Korea calls the Hwasong-10 and we call the Musudan, which is a variant of the Soviet missile that we call the SS-N-6 and they call the R-27.

Scott 7:39

Crystal clear, right? Yeah, just totally perfect lineage, no confusion and of the highest confidence.

Jeffrey 7:48

Right. So the problem and it's a significant it this is a significant caution. It's funny. So every time I say this and then I, you know, I add this caution, then my people coming back to me like repeating the caution at me like, yeah, I know. You know, like if we're 90 percent sure that it was a Khorramshahr and we're 90 percent sure that the you know, or that the officials write about it being a Khorramshahr and 90 percent sure that the whoever talked to Reuters is right about it being the same type of missile.

That was tested in July and 90% sure about Lucas Tomlinson's July 2016 report that that was a BM25, we have a little math to do. And, you know, you get, you know, you're at like 70% confidence. And I picked 90% arbitrarily. If these things are 60% confidence, then, you know, our cumulative confidence goes way down.

Scott 8:47

Yeah, so dropping very quickly.

Jeffrey 8:48

But... On the other hand, I don't think it's a terrible working assumption. Clearly, the Iranians have this new missile, the Khorramshahr, that we have never identified, at least on the open source side. And there's pretty good evidence that they bought this thing from North Korea called the BM-25, right?

Scott 9:13

Right.

Jeffrey 9:13

And, you know, it's kind of weird that they haven't tested it, given that the North Koreans have been testing the hell out of their variant, which we just commonly call the Musudan. So, like, it's not crazy that they would start testing this missile. And it's not crazy that the Khorramshahr would be the BM-25. Should we talk about the nomenclature and then, like, settle on what we're going to call this hairy beast?

Scott 9:33

Well, actually, before we got to the nomenclature, I wanted to know, did you want to talk about, there's another report that this sort of plays into, and that's, I think, offhand, it was 2010 that it was reported that a sale of Musudans may have occurred to Iran.

Jeffrey 9:50

Oh, no, it was 2005. It was in build.

Scott 9:52

2005.

Jeffrey 9:53

Yeah, which is a German tabloid. All right, so let's walk through this. That's right. All right, let's do nomenclature and see if we can walk through the sorted story.

Scott 9:59

Okay, because the nomenclature does end up kind of working on the timeline surprisingly well. Yeah, well. Do you want to start with the Soviet nomenclature? Work it all the way back to the grandfather?

Jeffrey 10:11

Yeah, I actually wrote a post called Origins of the Musudan IRBM. And so let's walk through this from the back to the front, okay? Sounds good. So the story starts in October 1992 at Sheremetyevo Airport. Ever been to Sheremetyevo?

Scott 10:31

I haven't made it out there yet.

Jeffrey 10:33

Well, you know, I believe it was designed for the Moscow Olympics.

Scott 10:39

Oh.

Jeffrey 10:39

And it has that lighthearted, spunky feel of the Brezhnev era. Okay.

Scott 10:50

I'll try to imagine that.

Jeffrey 10:52

Yeah. I remember I walked in once and it had this ceiling with these like, you know, it's really heavy and oppressive. It's like, you know, concrete and I guess it's steel. But, you know, there were these like tubes on the ceiling with these light bulbs in them. Right. It was supposed to be this kind of bright, but kind of semi-industrial ceiling.

But like all of the light bulbs were out. Right. I mean, there were a few a few were on enough, like just enough to get the sense that like, oh, yeah, this this this ceiling is supposed to be covered in light bulbs. It was like, yeah, that's depressing. OK, so October 1992, Chermetyevo Airport authority stopped technical personnel from the Machiave design bureau trying to go to North Korea.

Scott 11:39

Right. And for listeners, would you like to explain what the Machiave Design Bureau is? If you're just tuning into the Arms Control Walk podcast for the first time, let's explain what the Machiave Design Bureau is.

Jeffrey 11:50

They make missiles. They made Soviet missiles. And the reason this mattered is because the North Koreans got their scuds from Egypt, not the Soviets. Right. And the Scud is an old missile. And so it's I presume the guys at Machiave would know how to make them. But like, that's not. Not what they do really. They don't really make scuds.

Scuds were manufactured earlier and the entities that were involved in the scud manufacturer ended up in a different rocket, a different Bureau, but you know, like that was still like a long time ago anyway. Right. So so really we don't think of the Machiavelli as making the scud. And so like the question is why you going, you know, like what you working on?

Scott 12:38

Nice little vacay in North Korea.

Jeffrey 12:40

You know, because, you know, the North Koreans have reverse engineered these Egyptian scuds. The North Koreans have a pretty good idea how these things work. And, you know, maybe any old Russian missile designer will do to work on your scud program. But it seemed a little bit of overkill. So that was hint one that something was up.

And obviously... There was a sudden interest in like, oh, well, maybe they're working on a missile that looks like something Machiave made. Then in 2003? Satellite images. This leaks to the South Korean press, and then I think the LA Times had a pretty good story on it. Satellite images showed five launchers and ten missiles out at an airfield that looked like SSN-6s, which Makeyev makes.

Right. Now... First thought, right? First note on nomenclature. The Russians call this missile the R-27, but since the Soviets were not so nice as to inform us every time they came up with a new missile, the U.S. had to have its own naming system.

Scott 13:51

That's correct.

Jeffrey 13:52

And so we call it the SS-N-6. That's surface-to-surface naval six.

Scott 13:58

I think that's the Serb for the NATO nickname.

Jeffrey 14:02

That's right. Right, right. And they use Zib. Yes. And so, you know, like, hmm, yeah. What's really interesting about this story, by the way, is so here we have, you know, a missile in North Korea that is shaped like a Makayev product that would correspond to what that airport arrest detention was, right? And what's really interesting about this, by the way, Is, and this is kind of a separate issue, in this period, even though they don't flight test this thing, the United States and South Korea in the course of like two, three years between 2004 and 2006 go from saying like, yeah, we've seen these things, they're about to field it, to literally listing this thing as deployed.

And people never talk about this, but if you look at all the U.S. official statements from about 2006 on, We say they have deployed this untested missile.

Scott 15:05

As opposed to, say, like, IISS, at least through 2015, was listing North Korea as having essentially one brigade of Scuds.

Jeffrey 15:13

Yeah, but the South Koreans in the U.S. consistently say that thing is deployed, which I think is interesting. But then it gets interesting. Because in 2005, the German newspaper Bild, by the way, that's a very nice way to say it. It's actually not a newspaper. It's a tabloid. Reports that Iran sold 18 SS-N-6 kits, or North Korea sold them to Iran.

Scott 15:38

Now, Bray, what is an SSN kit versus a full missile or industrial expertise?

Jeffrey 15:44

So I am not sure that the good tabloid writers at Build...

Scott 15:56

They may not have done their diligence on nomenclature.

Jeffrey 15:59

So it's in German.

Scott 16:02

Right.

Jeffrey 16:02

And it's all about Iran's rockets can reach Berlin. The way I wrote at the time, I said the tone of the article did not do much to inspire confidence in the accuracy of the report. However, it's very clear that the U.S. thought this was true because pretty quickly after that, U.S. and Asian officials are confirming the story in other reports.

There's like a Wall Street Journal report. And then the joy of WikiLeaks. Right. We have several references to the missile in the WikiLeaks cables. And it's clear that the U.S. thinks the transfer happened. And there's even sort of a discussion where the... The Russians are like, we don't even believe this missile exists, you know. The U.S. is kind of like, oh, well, okay.

So there's that. But, yes, so then in 2007, oh, so we have to do nomenclature, right? So the R-27 ZIB or the SS-N-6 CERB, when it shows up in North Korea, we name it the Musudan after the test site.

Scott 17:16

Right, because it's seen in Musa Dami.

Jeffrey 17:18

Right, because we don't know what they call it. Right. It will be many, many, many years later that they will test the thing, and when they do test the thing, many, many years later. It was last year, right, that they finally get around to testing the thing successfully. Right, and then they tell us it's the Hwasong-10. So they name their missiles Hwasong, which is Mars, although it's not really Mars, because, right, Mars in, you know, that Latin reference is, you know, the god of war.

Scott 17:42

It's the Fire Star is what Hwasong is.

Jeffrey 17:44

Yeah, that's right.

Scott 17:45

It also refers to, there's a couple of fortresses throughout the country that are also named Hwasong.

Jeffrey 17:49

Yeah, I mean, which still has a martial quality to it, but it's an Asian martial quality rather than a Mediterranean one.

Scott 17:57

A literal martial quality. That's where Mars and martial are related words.

Jeffrey 18:03

Oh, I see. You're right. Crap. Man, talk about dead metaphors.

Scott 18:10

That's literally a pun for a dead language.

Jeffrey 18:11

I know, you're right. You're right, you're right, you're right, you're right. But the metaphor is so dead, I don't even think about it.

Scott 18:17

Yeah.

Jeffrey 18:19

All right. So... So in 2007...

Scott 18:25

Yes.

Jeffrey 18:27

There were reports that the North Koreans were going to parade the thing in Pyongyang, but then they didn't do it. Right. And then... There is this report in 2007 that the Iranians test-fire one of these things for the North Koreans.

Scott 18:44

Right.

Jeffrey 18:45

But I don't, in retrospect, buy that.

Scott 18:48

Yeah, and that at the time had some very... I don't honestly remember this report a lot because of how strange it seemed.

Jeffrey 18:57

But we're pretty sure the transfer happened, and this is where BM-25 comes in. Right. BM-25 is what the North Koreans... One of the names... There's actually yet another name we don't even mention. One of the names North Koreans use in marketing materials.

Scott 19:14

Okay.

Jeffrey 19:15

Ballistic missile, 2,500 kilometers. Right. I believe they also call it a Scud-E, right? Do you remember the trip report that the Burmese wrote up after they visited the Chongjin Missile Factory?

Scott 19:35

Oh, is that Pyongyang Pig Factory?

Jeffrey 19:37

Yep, yep, yep.

Scott 19:38

Yep, yep. So they refer to a Scud-E type variant that they see, if I remember correctly.

Jeffrey 19:44

Well, so they have a whole list, right? There are Scud Bs, Cs, Ds, Es, Fs, and it goes up to Fs. Right, and it has the ranges, and if you work it out, the C and D, the B, C, and D we know, and then one of them is the Nodong, and the other is the Musudan. Maybe the Scud F is the Musudan.

Whatever, it's just a marketing. I love that they use English marketing names. Scud is like a brand.

Scott 20:11

Yeah.

Jeffrey 20:13

Andrea Berger has this really interesting story from Mick Ranger, the North Korean arms dealer. Where he was saying why they do that, maybe not with missiles, but with other armaments, but you can see why they do the practice, which is like the approach is always, you know, people know the Soviet equipment.

Scott 20:31

Right.

Jeffrey 20:32

And what they know is the American name for the Soviet equipment.

Scott 20:36

You're just letting them brand, you're just running off of essentially the branding that the U.S. has been provided via the Soviet Union.

Jeffrey 20:43

Yeah, you know, we're like, ah, you know, scuds are horrible, you know, and it's like, You want one of those scuds? And your leader's like, yeah, the Americans say they're awful.

Scott 20:55

They say that they're the most threatening weapon ever.

Jeffrey 20:57

Can we get like 10 of those? And he's like, yeah, I can get you some scuds. And then they come back, right? And they say, you know, thing is... It's going to be a little hard to get these out of the Russians. And this is kind of expensive. Is it really important to you that they be Russian scuds?

Scott 21:19

What have we just, these scuds fell off the back of a truck. That truck may not have had gas in it.

Jeffrey 21:25

I mean, Mick Ranger obviously was generally selling smaller arms, but like, that's how he would like, like work up the relationship is, you know, using the Soviet era system name, often the US name of the Soviet era system. And then like telling people like, I can get you a good deal if you're flexible on exactly where this thing was made.

Right and then by then you realize you're buying them from the north koreans and so i think even like even when they're bringing people to the the the the chumjin missile factory right so people know they're in north korea they're still calling them scuds right so that is the brand name but so bm25 is a ballistic missile it goes 2500 kilometers and in 2007 there's this report that they tested it And then, you know, we start to see this other stuff, and this is where the WikiLeaks cables are valuable again.

We are in this position where the Iranians show off the Saphir, right, which is their space launcher.

Scott 22:24

Right.

Jeffrey 22:25

And there are little technical details of the Saphir in terms of, like, the... Weld lines on the tank showing what kind of fuel it uses. I think it's second stage, not its first stage, but its second stage. And the verniers. And so the U.S. tells the Russians in this classified setting that, you know, we see that as tangible evidence that the missiles came over.

Yeah.

Scott 22:58

Specifically, what you're saying is that the weld lines and the verniers and whatnot show a surprising resemblance to North Korean tech in a way that would be pretty unlikely to be coincidental.

Jeffrey 23:10

Oh, they look like SS-N-6. Yeah, exactly. And now now it's one that we have this question about what kind of fuel the Saphir uses. So I don't want to necessarily like double down on somebody else's open source intelligence. But it is just worth noting that, you know, the U.S. government took open source photographs of the Saphir and pointed to features both.

Oh, you know this, but maybe listeners don't. The ratio of fuel to oxidizer is specific for every fuel type.

Scott 23:38

Right. And so that if you can figure out the size of the tanks, you can start figuring out that mixture ratios.

Jeffrey 23:43

That's right. And then you know what kind of fuel it is. And so they argued that the second stage of the Saphir was UDMH and what? NTO, I guess.

Scott 23:50

NTO? Yeah, it's NTO.

Jeffrey 23:53

And then that the Vernier thrusters on the second stage? Third stage now I'm doing somebody else's one of the upper stages in question right look to them like they came off SSN sixes and so you had Iran demonstrating the fuel type and having components and so you know our argument our the United States is argument to the Russians was this is a this is this is evidence of that transfer and then you know just to tap it all off then in 2010 the North Koreans finally finally parade the damn thing right And it's a little different because it's a little bigger.

Scott 24:29

Yeah.

Jeffrey 24:30

A little longer. And by the way, Nate Taylor, our graduate student, has made a beautiful model of the Musudan. He has. Which, you know, everybody should go in and Sketchfab and check out. And it's fun. Like, they're pretty. And I know people like them because they're pretty. But I actually also like them because, you know, there's this incredible discipline that That you have when you model it and so I don't know if you know this but he surfaced an interesting technical feature about how the Hwasong-10 slash Musudan differs from the R-27 slash SS-N-6 I have not heard this what is this so the Soviet version was intended for a submarine right so it was capped for how tall it could be yeah Because, you know, you can't have the missile sticking out of the submarine.

Scott 25:27

Yeah. Space constraints are important when you're underwater.

Jeffrey 25:30

Yeah. But you don't have that with a land-based missile.

Scott 25:39

Right. Or at least not in the same way.

Jeffrey 25:41

Not in the same way.

Scott 25:42

Extreme constraints.

Jeffrey 25:43

Right. I mean, yeah, they're not hard constraints. They're like my time tonight. They're soft constraints. So... The Soviet version in order to deal with the height constraint used a common bulkhead between the fuel and oxidizer tanks. There are two features of the Soviet missile that are peculiar. One is the engine is inside its own fuel tank, right?

Scott 26:11

It's submerged, but then the listeners will post a picture of it in the show notes because it's a little complicated.

Jeffrey 26:17

Now we'll put it on the Slack channel. That's right. You know, you don't have to pay for this podcast, but you do have to pay for the show notes. All right. So but then the top of one tank is the bottom of the next. So I guess it's the top of the fuel tank is the bottom of the oxidizer tank.

Scott 26:34

Right. As opposed to a land based missile or a non space constrained missile where they sort of have a little more wiggle room. Right. A little more air.

Jeffrey 26:41

So there are two physical tanks. Right. That are like not the same thing.

Scott 26:45

Right. This is minimizing dead space.

Jeffrey 26:47

Right. So Nate figured out that the engine is still submerged, but that the fuel and oxidizer tanks, the propellant tanks, are physically separate. So there's a little band that they've added, which the reason that's so important, which sounds like this is this tiny little detail he noticed, but what it tells you is these aren't kits. Right. But they aren't—you know, one of the ideas was that, you know, oh, well, the Soviet-era kits are laying around, and the North Koreans just bought the kits and then put them together under the tutelage of Russian engineers.

Ah, okay. But that's not true. These missiles deviate in their design. They are longer— And the North Koreans made the fuel tank and the oxidizer tank and the missile body. Right. And so it's a sign that the North Koreans are sort of doing some of this work themselves. How much, you know, we can argue about.

Scott 27:41

Yeah. But it's also important to know that it's lengthened, not widened. Because if you change the width of a missile or the diameter, usually that requires a rebuild of the engine in a very complex or a more complex way than increasing the length of the missile. Yeah.

Jeffrey 27:55

And what's crazy about this story, the reason I'm going through this is because, you know, allegedly this, you know, the Chermetyevo thing happens in the early 90s. And the first sign of this missile was in the mid 2000s. And then we're saying it's deployed. But there's no evidence that they, you know, they don't parade the thing until 2010.

Right. And only then, and I think 2011 and 2012, do we get good intelligence sources saying in the press that North Korea is doing a static engine test series. Right. Where they're testing the engines over and over and over again. And they do that for a couple of years, right? And so that goes to, like, 2012. And then they take, like, a couple years off.

And then it's only, like, in the last year, 2016, that you start seeing serious flight testing of this missile.

Scott 28:44

Yeah.

Jeffrey 28:44

And most of them fail.

Scott 28:47

Five out of six at this point of the North Koreans fail.

Jeffrey 28:51

Or eight if you think the ones in October were Musudans, right? Right. We don't know. I think the official, I think the correct thing to say is we don't know what was tested in October. So, you know, there's this like really long gestation period, but once the North Koreans successfully test the Musudan, then we see the Iranians move to start testing the BM-25 or their version of it.

Right. Right. And so one thing that's important is, you know, there's the Soviet R-27. There's whatever the North Koreans built. There's the version they exported, which is a different range. Right. The U.S. intelligence community said the Musudan had a 4000 kilometer range with a 500 kilogram warhead. And, you know, BM-25 is 2500 kilometer range. So is it like the same missile?

Is it a different missile? You know, like there may be some slight variance. And, you know, the Iranians have had like a decade to fool around with this thing. So when we see it, we have no, you know, like it may be a copy of the North Korean version. Maybe the North Korean version is co-development with the Iranian version.

Or maybe they, like the Nodong and Shahab, have gone down really different developmental paths. You know, the Shahab-3 in Iran is allegedly a copy of the Nodong, but has lots of substantial differences, including the fact that the Nodong is steel and the Shahab-3 is an aluminum airframe.

Scott 30:13

Yeah, the Iranians have had more than enough time to make it their own missile if they wanted to.

Jeffrey 30:19

Right.

Scott 30:19

If that's the path they're taking.

Jeffrey 30:20

Yeah, which gets to this big kind of, I think, interesting question, which is, you know, traditionally we thought that it's the North Koreans who are supplying the Iranians because that's how the relationship started. Right. But the Iranians, unlike the North Koreans, are far less isolated, spend a lot of money with entities in Russia and China. And in many ways took the things they imported from Iran and made them their own.

And lately the reports we've seen about Iranian technicians in North Korea and the Iranians assisting the North Koreans on their new space booster, at some point I think the technology flow has either balanced out so that it's a mutually beneficial relationship or even started to be more from Iran to North Korea.

Scott 31:07

Right, and you've mentioned that once or twice before on the pod. Specifically, I think actually in relation to the nodong, that the Iranians may be getting better at rocket science than the Russians.

Jeffrey 31:17

Nobody believes me, by the way. I should say, this is my highly revisionist... I'm going to get angry notes from my friends saying, I can't believe you said that! There's just no evidence for that. I admit the evidence is not great, but I see the... Either the North Koreans are getting really, really good and transferring that to the Iranians, or, you know, it's more like a co-development.

Oh, you know, a couple years ago, Jeff Forden got some Iranian missile memos, which he summarized on the blog, that really implied, even at that point, the relationship had started to even out. And that it was better to think of the Iranian and North Korean missile programs and, you know, as at least the liquid fuel programs like dudes from the Shig and Comid as a loose, a loose consortium involved in co-development with some third country entities.

Scott 32:19

Hmm.

Jeffrey 32:20

I don't want to straight up accuse the Russians and the Chinese because I don't think it's the Russians and the Chinese, but I think there were some Russians and some Chinese entities involved. Right. Which is like a really, you know, it's like Vector for the modern era.

Scott 32:37

That's what I was going to reference. It's the Condor 2 slash Vector program, which though if it was Condor 2 Vector, that'd mean we would not have to worry about it and it'll just go away on its own in a few years.

Jeffrey 32:48

Yeah, I don't think we're going to get that lucky. So we should talk about implications now that we've talked about what we think this thing is. And I'm going to make one more pitch for Nate Taylor's awesome missile models. I get really frustrated that people keep saying this violates the Iran nuclear deal.

Scott 33:05

They don't. It's the Iran nuclear deal, not the Iran nuclear and missile deal. You know what I think frustrates me about this? Is it just one thing?

Jeffrey 33:16

No, yeah, it is really just one thing. It's that the decision to pursue a nuclear-only deal and not deal with missiles and not deal with the security situation...

Scott 33:29

It's like this exact reason, wasn't it?

Jeffrey 33:31

Right, right. It was a defensible choice by the Obama administration. But I think... Conservatives could have and should have criticized them at the time for that, and some did, right? I mean, there was, there is a case to be made that solving the nuclear problem doesn't solve the regional security situation. It doesn't solve the missile program. And so even if you do this, and actually afterwards I argued the Obama administration needed to do this, like, now that you have a nuclear deal, you have to work on these other problems, right?

Right. And if you don't, then you're going to squander the nuclear deal, which is what we discovered with North Korea. We had a nuclear deal with North Korea. It worked OK. But we had these other problems and we tried to deal with the missile program and we failed. And ultimately that led to the unraveling of everything. And so I guess what's frustrating to me is.

Saying that you're against the deal, and then complaint, then reinterpreting the deal to say something different, you know? It's like the, the responsible thing to do would be to say. I told you it was a mistake to leave out missiles, and now you see, even though they don't have nuclear weapons, they're still continuing their missile program, and the neighbors are super alarmed, and we've got to do something about that.

That's why we should have included them in the first place, but now we've given up most of our sanctions relief, so we have less. There's a legitimate, respectable, conservative argument to make along those lines. But yeah, I don't know. Part of it is also people don't understand the UN. I try to explain... Sorry, for listeners... The Iran nuclear deal comprises a series of documents.

The most important one is the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which I want to call the Wiener Plan.

Scott 35:22

The JCPOA.

Jeffrey 35:24

Right, right. Or the Wiener Plan. After Vienna, where it was signed. And that document imposes no restrictions on Iran's missile program. When the UN Security Council passed 2231, which was the Security Council resolution that removed the sanctions pursuant to the JCPOA, right, that allowed it to come into force, they had this problem where, you know, we used to have this really strong language telling the Iranians that they had to stop missile testing.

Scott 35:53

Right.

Jeffrey 35:54

And so the question is, like, what do you do with that language? You know, obviously, one, the Iranians, I think, would have preferred that language to disappear entirely, right? Course but we don't want that because we're against them testing missiles, and we don't want to give them, we don't want to say the Iran nuclear deal is a permission slip to test missiles. So they, they compromised on that, you know, the wishy-washy Security Council language in which Iran is called upon to cease missile tests, you know, and called upon, and you know, means like strongly recommended.

Scott 36:25

Would you say that they were perhaps put on a sort of notice?

Jeffrey 36:30

Right. So so it you know, so basically the the the idea that it violates the Security Council resolution, like it's inconsistent with the part of the Security Council resolution that is very softly worded.

Scott 36:43

Right.

Jeffrey 36:43

You know, because we knew this was going to be a problem. And then that raises this question of what the hell we do. And yeah, Donald Trump saying Iran, you're on notice doesn't really answer that question for me. They're putting you on notice, Scott. Scott, I want you to know, I hope you know, this is going to go down on your permanent record.

Scott 37:07

The State Department has a black Sharpie, and they are mere moments away from marking naughty, naughty things on the array. Iran's been on notice since they overthrew the Shah.

Jeffrey 37:19

Have you seen Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs?

Scott 37:21

I have not.

Jeffrey 37:22

That's because you don't have small children. I do.

Scott 37:24

That's what I was about to say.

Jeffrey 37:26

Flint Lockwood, I have my eye on you. Do you see this contact lens? This is you. Do you see my eyeball? That's my eyeball.

Scott 37:34

My eye is on you.

Jeffrey 37:35

We're not going to stop the Iranians from testing by carping at them. I do think the sanctions that were released today are a pretty good start. They're not going to stop the Iranians, but at least, you know, at least it's not like empty rhetoric. It's, you know, some small punishment, which is sort of proportionate to the like aggravation with them testing a missile.

Scott 37:59

Right. Oh, can you imagine the sanctions if they had tested a missile like during the press conference in which they were put on notice? That would be awesome.

Jeffrey 38:08

Let me say this in a positive and forward looking way, though. Which is the Iranians are complaining they didn't get enough sanctions relief. Right? They're complaining that the deal didn't really deliver as much openness as they had wanted.

Scott 38:25

They're perhaps arguing that the spirit isn't being held up.

Jeffrey 38:30

And, you know, my response to that is your isolation is in part a function of your nuclear weapons program. And that's now been managed or resolved is not quite the right word, but... Handled right there's a framework in place to address those concerns but we still have a regional security situation that we don't like and we you know we don't like what you're doing in Syria although you know maybe Putin will tell Trump that he does like it and that'll fix that but we really don't like what you're doing with your missile program so if you know you want more sanctions relief then you know Stop firing missiles.

Maybe we can work out the missiles. And, you know, from my perspective, like the Iranians have a pretty big missile program and pretty soon it's going to shift over to solids. And so, like, it probably makes sense to try to get a handle on this. I, you know, I always say this. Everybody hates this idea, but I think I'm right.

You know, really what we need to do is we need to focus on, I think, cutting the North Koreans off of the Iranian assistance and trying to channel the Iranians into their space launch program.

Scott 39:36

Yeah.

Jeffrey 39:36

Which, you know, does have benefits for their missile program, but not the same benefits that the solid fuel missile program is going to bring. And, you know, there is a universe in which you can imagine trying to keep the Iranians on things like liquid oxygen, which make for kind of crappy ICBMs. And so, you know, there might be a deal there where, you know, you take some sanctions off.

They restructure the liquid fuel programs really to be a space launch program that makes for not great ICBMs. And they cut the North Koreans off. That would be worth doing.

Scott 40:10

Maybe we can even get an architecture to get like maybe certain neighbors to perhaps reduce their DF who knows what stockpiles.

Jeffrey 40:19

Well, that's a whole other conversation. There are more missiles in the Middle East than I think people realize. There are some unreported allied missile deployments that maybe we'll talk about in a future podcast. Hey, Scott. Hey. Thanks for joining me. This has been a lot of fun.

Scott 40:37

Yeah, anytime we talk about North Korea, even we can turn an Iranian-oriented podcast into a North Korea-oriented podcast with just a little bit of work.

Jeffrey 40:45

We have that superpower. Yeah. And thank you for listening. If you like the podcast, leave us an iTunes review. And if you really like the podcast, consider going to our Patreon page and supporting us. It sustains our podcast. And Scott, we got any cool subscriber benefits coming up?

Scott 41:02

Yep, we're going to put up some Arms Control Wonk art projects as soon as I get the proofs done for scan. So those will be up very soon at the $15 and $25 a month level. So premium friends of the pod can get our super dorky artwork projects that I personally love on my desk.

Jeffrey 41:23

Awesome. That sounds cool.

Scott 41:26

All right.

Jeffrey 41:27

So again, thank you for listening and talk to you next week.