What Is Iran Up To?

We know that Iran is busy working towards nuclear enrichment. We know that with sufficient time, they can produce weapons grade uranium for use in nuclear weapons.

We know that the Iranians are busy working with long range missiles and looking to extend the range of those missiles.

What we don't know, and what we can't quite explain is what Kenneth Timmerman is reporting.

One group of tests that troubled Graham, the former White House science adviser under President Ronald Reagan, were successful efforts to launch a Scud missile from a platform in the Caspian Sea.

“They’ve got [test] ranges in Iran which are more than long enough to handle Scud launches and even Shahab-3 launches,” Dr. Graham said. “Why would they be launching from the surface of the Caspian Sea? They obviously have not explained that to us.”

Another troubling group of tests involved Shahab-3 launches where the Iranians "detonated the warhead near apogee, not over the target area where the thing would eventually land, but at altitude,” Graham said. “Why would they do that?”

Graham chairs the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack, a blue-ribbon panel established by Congress in 2001.

The commission examined the Iranian tests “and without too much effort connected the dots,” even though the U.S. intelligence community previously had failed to do so, Graham said.

“The only plausible explanation we can find is that the Iranians are figuring out how to launch a missile from a ship and get it up to altitude and then detonate it,” he said. “And that’s exactly what you would do if you had a nuclear weapon on a Scud or a Shahab-3 or other missile, and you wanted to explode it over the United States.”

In plain English, rather than a direct nuclear weapons attack on the US or other enemy of Iran, the Iranians are looking at the possibility of attacking the economies of its enemies with an EMP attack since it would fry key electronics and would have potentially catastrophic results to countries heavily dependent upon technology.

So, what is a country trying to defend against this kind of threat to do? Plan and position defensive capabilities. Those include missile defense systems that have the ability to take out approaching missiles in their launch and apogee phases, before they have a chance to strike.

It also means that one has to take a closer look at preemptive attacks against the Iranian nuclear and missile tech infrastructure.

Perhaps most importantly, it means beefing up intel assets capable of figuring out what Iran is up to, how close they are to successfully obtaining weapons grade uranium, assembling nuclear warheads, mating such warheads to long range missiles, and possible targets.

As it stands now, there is a sword of Damocles hanging over the world, and only a few are cognizant of that threat. Far too many think that the real threat is America's enterprise in the Middle East and our alliance with the Israelis and our efforts to bring democracy to Iraq. These people may realize far too late that the enemy was telling them all along what he was going to do.