Calm Down. Iran's Missiles Can't (and Won't) Hit the East Coast.

Photo: U.S. Air Force

Israel is claiming that Iran is thisclose to developing a missile that can hit American soil. But missile and intelligence experts say Tehran has a long, technically complex road to travel before it can threaten Manhattan.

From getting all the rocket thrusters to work properly to developing heat shields that can withstand the stresses of rapid atmospheric reentry, Iran is probably many years away from getting an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The American spy apparatus, which once hyped the Iranian missile threat, has quietly stopping saying when Iran can hit the east coast. And the irony is that it’s taking Iran so long precisely because its missile efforts really are sophisticated.

“The bottom line,” says Paul Pillar, a veteran CIA Mideast analyst, “is that the intelligence community does not believe [the Iranians] are anywhere close to having an ICBM.”

That, however, isn’t the message out of Jerusalem. Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz told CNBC on Wednesday Iran was “two to three years” away from slamming a missile into New York, Boston or Washington. Its strategic-affairs minister, Moshe “Bogie” Yaalon, issued that same warning earlier this month, but declined to say when Iran’s mega-missile would be ready.

Chances are, the Israelis are hyping the Iranian missile threat so their American friends will consider the Iranian threat more acute. They’re not happy with Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for saying on Sunday that an Israeli attack on Iran was “not prudent.” But few missile or intelligence experts believe the new claim of an imminent Iranian ICBM is going to change Dempsey’s mind, or anyone else’s, because it’s far-fetched.

It’s true that Tehran has a robust missile program. Its stockpiles of Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, which top out at 800 miles, strike fear into the hearts of Arab Gulf states. Israel has real reason to fear the development of its Sejjil medium-range ballistic missile, a more sophisticated weapon, that could maybe reach Israel in a few years. And unlike rogue-state missile flameouts like North Korea, Iran is able to launch satellites into space, which is a key ICBM step (since any intercontinental missile is going to have to fly through space in order to attack a foe so far away).

But none of that adds up to Iran getting a missile that can travel the 6,000 miles necessary for striking America any time soon.

For one thing, Iran needs to master what’s called “clustering” of the engines needed to power its missile. Picture a box with an engine — probably from a North Korean Nodong-2, the paterfamilias of Iran’s missiles — on each corner. Iran in fact unveiled precisely such a design in 2010.

There’s a long way between design and a working set of thrusters, however. Basically, in order to keep the missile on track as it streaks through the heavens, each engine has to provide precisely the same amount of thrust. If not, the pulses of acoustic energy from one engine might destroy another. “That’s not an easy thing, to make sure they fire simultaneously and don’t shake themselves to death in process,” says Greg Thielmann, a former missile analyst at the State Department’s intelligence wing.

Then there are additional technical obstacles Iran isn’t believed to have overcome. Guidance systems need to be able to withstand the pressures of atmospheric reentry to keep the missile on course. “Then the warhead itself has to function at such extreme physical conditions,” says Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear studies program at the Federation of American Scientists. “There are several really complicated steps they have to go through to do this.”

As well as mundane ones. Iran will have to balance durability and weight, most likely leading it to want aluminum alloys for any early long-range missile rather than heavy steel, says David Wright of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Tehran may not have the aluminum stocks for it. It may not even have the machine tools necessary for boring out an ICBM’s diameter. And ICBMs are big, meaning if they stay in one place for too long, they’ll be vulnerable to detection — and an Israeli or American bombing campaign. That’s why Wright thinks they’ll have to be rugged enough to survive being moved along the roads, which can also create convoys ripe for the schwacking.

Even Iran’s seriousness about its missiles is a potential time-suck. Unlike North Korea, which rushes to claim military glory even when its missile tests fail, Iran tends to test its missile stockpile thoroughly. Long-range missiles tests will likely mean Iranian ships heading out into the Indian Ocean to collect data and telemetry. Which are also vulnerable to detection, giving the U.S. and Israel some early warning.

“You’re gonna know whether this happens. You’re gonna see at least one flight test of this bigger stage,” Wright says. “We haven’t seen them develop reentry vehicles on something this long-range.”

Bottom line? Iran is probably “five to ten years away” from an ICBM, Wright thinks. That seems plausible to other experts interviewed for this story, though most demurred from making an actual prediction.

That’s similar to what U.S. spy agencies used to estimate. Emphasis on the used to.

In 1993, the CIA told Congress Iran was “10 to 15 years” away from an ICBM. An assessment of the missile threat in 1995 drawn from across the 16 intelligence agencies, called a National Intelligence Estimate, pegged the date for doomsday at 2010.

That actually caused a freakout from Republicans in Congress, who accused the CIA of understating the urgency of the Iranian missile threat to help the Clinton administration stall on missile defense. They in turn asked Donald Rumsfeld to chair a commission on ballistic missiles. Rumsfeld’s conclusion, in 1998, was that it would take Iran at most five years to build a long-range missile; and he warned the Iranians may have already decided to do so.

All of those estimates were ultimately proven to be unrealistic. The Iranians didn’t have an ICBM in 2003, they didn’t have one in 2010, and they don’t have one now.

Lately, the spy agencies have sung a different tune. When James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, briefed Congress on the Iranian missile threat this month, he notably declined to predict when Iran would get an ICBM. Same with his predecessor, Dennis Blair.

“That’s probably a tacit acknowledgement that they really don’t have much to say,” says Pillar, who was the top Mideast analyst for the entire constellation of intelligence agencies during much of the last decade. “It’s far enough away to say ‘they’re so many years away,’ or you don’t say anything at all.”

Israel has lots of reasonable fears about Iran, a country whose president denies the Holocaust while implying that he’d love a second one, and which appears to be building a nuclear weapon. It doesn’t have to make all kinds of extra concerns up.

Additional research assistance provided by Robert Beckhusen.

Spencer Ackerman is Danger Room's senior reporter, based out of Washington, D.C., covering weapons of doom and the strategies they're used to implement.
Follow @attackerman and @dangerroom on Twitter.

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How to interpret Iran's new nuclear advances

The nuclear advances announced Wednesday by Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are a prelude to an expected new round of talks between Tehran and Western powers -- and also a moment of electioneering by a political faction struggling to retain its grip on the country's elected institutions. Expressing Tehran's defiance in the face of escalating Western sanctions, the announcements suggest that while Iran's leaders might be giving themselves the option of making concessions, they're not about to cry uncle and accept the terms being demanded of them.

Ahmadinejad was shown on national TV attending the installation of a domestically-produced fuel plate of uranium enriched to 20% into a Tehran research reactor that produces medical isotopes. He also attended an elaborate ceremony announcing what Tehran said was a "new generation" of centrifuges capable of more rapidly enriching uranium -- a claim questioned by some non-proliferation experts, such as the International Institute for Strategic Studies' Mark Fitzpatrick who suggests that Iran has long overstated the capacity and sophistication of its centrifuges.

(READ: Can Israel stop Iran's nuke efforts?)

Still, the announcements signaled continued defiance of international pressure over Iran's nuclear program, which is steadily accumulating the means to build nuclear weapons even if (as U.S. and allied intelligence agencies concur) Iran is not currently building such weapons, nor has it taken a decision to do so. The sanctions efforts of the Obama Administration and its European allies have begun to sharply affect Iranian living standards, and the White House has now begun moving to further strangle Iran's ability to export oil by seeking to block access to the international electronic banking transfer system. An Iranian TV network reported Wednesday that the country had decided to retaliate by halting oil exports to six European countries, to punish the EU for adopting an embargo on Iranian oil that comes into effect in June. Cutting off supplies before those countries had secured replacement supplies would disrupt oil markets -- prices hit a six-month high on the news -- although the Iranian officials disputed the report and said that no decision to that effect had yet been taken.

Iran has also been accused by Israel of staging an attack on one of its diplomats in India, and of being responsible for foiled attempts in Georgia and Thailand this week, with observers suggesting that they may be a crude and clumsy attempt at retaliation for the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists that Tehran blames on Israel. But particularly given their lack of professionalism, there's no definitive indication as yet over their authorship.

(READ: In Thailand, evidence suggests bombings tied to a larger plot.)

Although no date nor venue has yet been agreed, Iran has signaled its willingness to return to talks "without preconditions" over its nuclear program with the P5+1 group (the U.S., Britain, France, China and Russia plus Germany) that produced no progress a year ago in Istanbul. The no-preconditions stipulation is not an expression of flexibility, of course, because it is the Western powers that have set preconditions for renewed talks, in the form of Iranian readiness to respond positively to longstanding demands on uranium enrichment on which the two sides have failed to agree until now.

Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmed Davutoglu, in Washington this week following consultations in Iran, told U.S. officials that he believed Iran was ready to deal but that the different parties would have to overcome mutual suspicions. His government opposes sanctions and military threats as pointless and counterproductive to achieving a diplomatic settlement. Those sanctions may be putting the squeeze on the living standards of ordinary Iranians, but the assumption that this will fuel anger at the regime and pressure for it to back down on the nuclear issue may be flawed: Azadeh Moaveni reports that the anger being generated by the sanctions is, in fact, being directed primarily at the Western powers imposing them, eroding goodwill towards the West among many Iranians opposed to the regime.

Iran's nuclear program remains popular and a point of consensus within Tehran's fractured political system, and Ahmadinejad, whose faction is facing mounting pressure from rival conservatives loyal to the clerical Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, is clearly trying to milk nuclear achievements for political advantage in next month's parliamentary election.

(PHOTOS: Iranian Protesters Storm the U.S. Embassy)

The regime's message to its public -- and its Western interlocutors -- appears to be that Iran will not yield to sanctions and pressure, with the successful production of 20% enriched fuel rods a case in point: Iran had previously been prepared to negotiate over acquiring such fuel from abroad, but when the most recent version of that deal broke down and gave way to more sanctions, they went ahead and produced it themselves -- in the process honing their capacity to enrich uranium to higher grades, and therefore to produce bomb-grade materiel (enriched to 90%) if they chose to do so. Ongoing 20% enrichment also creates a cache of material that could be more rapidly reprocessed to weapons-grade.

Having proven their capacity to enrich to higher levels and produced the fuel necessary to run the Tehran Research Reactor, the Iranians could arguably be giving themselves the option of offering an end to 20% enrichment as a key concession (from their point of view) in any negotiations, for which they would expect a substantial quid-pro-quo in respect of sanctions. (Iran favors a model suggested by Russia in which incremental Iranian measures to strengthen safeguards against any military dimension to their program be choreographed in sequence with incremental reductions in international sanctions.) Having ceremoniously replenished the research reactor with home-made fuel, the Iranians could claim to a domestic audience that stopping 20% enrichment is not a concession, but simply that the job has been completed.

If there is a confidence building deal to be done, it may well focus on the 20% enrichment issue -- a comprehensive agreement over Iran's enrichment of reactor-fuel grade uranium (less than 4%) is likely to remain elusive for now. Israel and France continue to insist that Iran cannot be permitted to maintain any enrichment capability on its own soil, despite the Non-Proliferation Treaty allowing such enrichment under standard safeguards against weaponization. The Bush Administration had maintained the same position; the position of the Obama Administration on an acceptable end-point is less clear. But because even the enrichment infrastructure allowed to all signatories of the Non-Proliferation Treaty for peaceful energy purposes under IAEA supervision can be repurposed to manufacture bomb fuel, Israel and its partisans on Capitol Hill remain opposed to any deal that allows Iran all the rights of an NPT signatory -- and Iran remains equally determined to assert its right to enrich uranium for non-military purposes. So even if it goes to the negotiating table, there's no end in sight to the battle of wills over the Iranian nuclear program.

READ: In Iran, a Stirring of Green Protesters Produces a Clampdown

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