New Importance For Ballistic Missile Defense

For all the talk of the naysayers about the costs and the handwringing of Russia over the deployment of a missile defense system to Eastern Europe, the fact is that there are very good reasons for the US to deploy the system.

Today's news that Iran has indeed been working on a long range missile system capable of hitting targets in Europe, throughout the Middle East, and South Asia with a range of 6,000km, should be taken in conjunction with the fact that the North Koreans possess long range missiles of their own. The similarities between the Iranian program and the North Koreans should not be underestimated:

But four days after the launch another intriguing feature of the test became apparent: analysis of photographs taken by the Digital Globe QuickBird satellite indicated that the launch site of Kavoshgar 1, as the Shihab missile was dubbed by the Iranians, is also the site where Iran is busy developing ballistic missiles with a range of about 6,000 km.

The site, about 230 km southeast of Teheran, was previously unknown and its link with the Iranian weapons program was revealed by Jane's Intelligence Review after the images were studied by a former Iraq weapons inspector.

Using a space program as a façade for a weapons program was the path chosen by Korea until it declared it had passed the nuclear weapon threshold.

Geoffrey Forden, a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that there was a recently constructed building on the site, about 40 metres in length, which was similar in form and size to the Taepodong long-range missile assembly facility in North Korea.

Jane's Proliferation editor Avital Johanan said analysis of the Iranian site indicated that Teheran may be about five years away from developing a 6,000 km ballistic missile. This would tie in with American intelligence estimates and underlines why President Bush wants the Polish and Czech components of the US missile defence system to be up and running by 2013.

It is with this in mind that the US sought to deploy missile defense systems, which would be capable of protecting US strategic interests around the world.

The cost of doing nothing in the face of these threats is staggering, especially when such regimes may act irrationally under convention deterrence doctrines in the hopes of furthering religious/ideological goals even if it means catastrophic loss of life in the process.

Then, there's the question of what exactly would be placed on those missiles. Iran is currently expanding its nuclear enrichment program by threefold, which suggests that they are intent upon obtaining nuclear weapons. They are also denying that they're having trouble with the centrifuge cascades, which could be a smokescreen for troubles they're having, or the possibility that they've overcome serious technological hurdles in the enrichment process.

Mating those weapons with the new missiles would put tens of millions of people at risk of annihilation at the hands of ideological and genocidal leadership in Tehran.