Going Ballistic: Inside Iran’s Military Strategy and Arsenal

TALEBLU: By responding against the US, by directly responding against Israel, landing ballistic missiles in Israel, and being able to tell the tale the next day having survived? That’s the stuff that makes you quite worried about well, what would they do if they retained a long-range missile program, and they retained domestic enrichment, and they retained their terror proxies?
DUBOWITZ: Welcome to “The Iran Breakdown.” I’m Mark Dubowitz. What gives the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and the regime real teeth is the weaponry, a vast and growing arsenal of missiles, drones, and increasingly precise strike systems. I’m joined by Behnam Ben Taleblu, the senior director of FDD’s Iran Program here at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and a top expert on Iran and Iran’s weapons programs. He’s the author of a major study in Iran’s missile program, “Arsenal.” We’ll talk about the weapons themselves, how Iran is using them, and what Washington needs to understand about the regime’s playbook.
I’m your host, Mark Dubowitz, and this is “The Iran Breakdown.” So, let’s break it down.
Behnam, welcome.
TALEBLU: Great to be with you, Mark. Thanks for having me.
DUBOWITZ: It’s wonderful to have you. Behnam, you’ve been a longtime colleague and good friend and really an incredible contributor to our Iran program and the Iran debate in Washington. So, it’s wonderful to have you on the program.
I want to actually start with your personal story. Behnam Ben Taleblu, you sound Iranian-American. Tell us about your origins, your family history, your relationship to Iran, and then we can get into the details of Iran’s program.
TALEBLU: Thanks, Mark. I mean, in so many ways it’s a typical story because you have many Iranian-American and Iranian-North American friends in the diaspora. It’s all like a similar post-1979 story. But long story short is that even though I’ve never been to Iran, I’m born and raised here in the States, both to immigrant parents, even though I’ve never been, I already miss it. There was the Iran I heard about at home. There was the Iran I heard about among family. There was the Iran culturally and every other way that I heard about. And then there was the Iran that I saw growing up abroad, that contrasted very sharply with those lessons and those philosophies and those things that I learned at home. That’s what got me interested.
But both parents, as you know, are immigrants from Iran. Mom’s side a bit more political. Her father was a reporter under the late Shah, taken to Evin Prison by the nascent revolutionary regime. Got out briefly on bail and the whole mother’s side fled. And some of them fled to where they had friends, which at that point was Milan, Italy. And there she met my father in a carpet shop, kind of a stereotypical trade. But nonetheless, my father had been in the carpet world since age nine, and that’s when he stopped going to school. And my father has been in the carpet business since age nine up until he recently retired. He unfortunately lost his vision, but he retired near me. And he had been in this trade for almost six decades across three different continents, lots of lessons there.
They had moved to Midtown Manhattan and shortly after they had moved, yours truly got to grow up in the Big Apple, bridging the Iranian-American divide every single day. And I was a history nerd. I was a political science nerd. I wanted all the things and to be involved in all of the news that I was hearing and seeing, and to kind of put my slowly accumulating historical breadth and depth to the use for America, for potentially better Iran. And I’ve been in Washington now almost 18, 19 years, and it’s been a pleasure to spend I think a little over 12 of them with you at FDD.
DUBOWITZ: So, Ben, tell us a little bit about the family history in Iran, as much as you know. Your parents, born in Iran, grandparents, great-grandparents, dating back generations?
TALEBLU: As far as I know. Yeah, dating back generations. Mom’s family is originally from Tehran, a little bit more of a landed family, somewhat more political family. Originally, way, way, way back on the mom’s side they used to have a bunch of coal mines in Zanjan in the Northwest. I actually have some amazing pictures of my grandmother as a young kid being held by her dad, that would make it my great-grandfather, like surrounded by some military men from early 1920s or ’30s Tehran, right after the last dynasty came in – that the Pahlavi’s came in.
On the dad’s side, dad is actually from a small village in the Northwest, between two provinces, lived a very different life. Unfortunately, I never met my grandparents on my father’s side, and he had been living abroad since, actually, well before the revolution. And he got to see Iran at a distance, just like I’m kind of seeing Iran at a distance now.
DUBOWITZ: So, he left Iran long before the Islamic Revolution.
TALEBLU: Yes.
DUBOWITZ: And again, your mom, when did she leave? When did the family leave?
TALEBLU: They left just after the revolution. As soon as they got grandpa out on bail, the whole mother side fled after that.
DUBOWITZ: Wow. Wow. So, let’s talk a little bit about today’s Iran. I mean, obviously very different from the Iran that preceded the Islamic Revolution, or maybe not, with respect to military doctrine. Tell us a little bit about this Iran – today’s Iran’s military doctrine. And maybe compare and contrast to the military doctrine of the Shah. What has changed? Are there any sort of similarities, continuity between the Shah and the Islamic Republic?
TALEBLU: So, no doubt you and our listeners know that there’s this “H” word that’s often thrown around, a hegemon. I think, irregardless– or regardless of who is at the helm in Tehran, they want to be a big player on the block. That was true with respect to the late Shah. That was certainly true with the Islamic Republic and it’s eight-year war with Iraq and its “export the revolution” ideology and philosophy, and they’ve put blood and treasure behind that.
But for me, as an Iranian-American and also interested in the future of Middle Eastern order as an American, it’s not, is Iranian power in the Middle East or is Iranian power in the Persian Gulf a problem? It is to what ends is that power wielded. And whereas fundamentally, I would say the Shah’s military buildup, which was a real military buildup supported in large part by Washington during the Cold War, by the way, was genuine and a cataclysmic event for the future of security in the Middle East.
It was a buildup in defense of stability, in defense of the status quo. For example, the late Shah even bailing out the Omani Sultan Qaboos [bin Said al Said] in the run-up to a communist insurgency there working with the British, a force of stasis. The Islamic Republic has been taking what was left of that military might, added on this asymmetric terror element to it, and really has taken Iranian power and made it into a force of revolution, into a counter stasis force. So, everything that was pro-stability is now anti-stability. If the Shah’s Iran thrived when the region looked good and was stable and prosperous, the Ayatollahs’ Iran thrives when the region is made to look like rubble. I mean, you can only really export the Islamic Revolution if everywhere else around you, forgive me, looks like a war zone or looks like a hellhole.
And in every place where the Islamic Republic today has proxies which are essential for the Republic’s power projection, well those are downtrodden and dispossessed persons that the Islamic Republic has put a gun in the hand of to get them to shoot at someone that the regime in Tehran wants to shoot at, but simply can’t. So, there is Iranian power in the Middle East, both pre- and post-revolution, but the most important thing for Americans is the ends to which that power is wielded. And hopefully in our discussion today, we can talk about the actual weapons themselves that have really defined the Islamic Republic, unlike the late Shah.
DUBOWITZ: So, Behnam, we’re going to get into the details because it’s going to be a masterclass on Iran’s strategic weapons. But I want to just deal with a common contention that I hear here in Washington, and you obviously hear it as well, is that Islamic revolution [sic], despite ostensible aggressive activities in the region, has a defensive doctrine. And the reason they need a huge arsenal of missiles and drones is to protect Iranian sovereignty, to protect them from aggressive neighbors. It’s also a psychology that comes from the Iran-Iraq War, where they fought a brutal war against Saddam [Hussein] and the Iraqis. And as a result, they are arming themselves with these strategic weapons, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, drones, and by the way, a nuclear program, because they are concerned about defense. What do you make of that contention?
TALEBLU: I think that theory is like taking a Polaroid to the problem, or a screenshot or a snapshot of the problem, and not seeing the video or the change over time of the past 46 years. Because certainly, yes, the Islamic Republic is trying to avoid a military reprisal, is trying to avoid kinetic blow back. I mean, when you look at the Iranian military today, the conventional military, it’s a ghost of itself. If you look at Iranian defense spending, particularly compared to U.S. partners, particularly in the Gulf Cooperation Council states, it pales in comparison. They don’t have access to advanced western weapons or things of that nature.
But this regime is still a threat because the export of the revolution, the low cost militarized export of the revolution, all of which by the way, is what led to the Iran-Iraq War and all of those things you mentioned, missiles, drones, nuclear program, come out of the Iran-Iraq War, is because the regime has an ideology, and the regime has a vision and a theory of the case for what the regional order in the Middle East should look like. And as it goes about low-level, low-cost, trying to project power, make those inroads with those downtrodden and dispossessed people that we talk about, whether that happened very early like the Iraqis, or the Lebanese, or that happened decades later with respect to the Houthis in Yemen, they are trying to make those inroads.
And I think they rightly understand that hey, we are poking and prodding in lots of people’s backyard. This is dangerous stuff. How do we allow ourselves to continue to poke and prod, go very low-cost into these high-risk situations and shield ourselves from blow back? That was, in my view, the initial theory for the missile program, the nuclear program. It’s deterrent and defensive, but it’s designed to be a shield such that the sword can continue to strike at the regime’s adversaries, be they Arabs, be they Israelis, be they U.S. forces or interest in the region. This is designed part and parcel to shield them.
But once they got so good at being shielded, it developed an offensive component to it. So, it’s not just that the Islamic Republic has missiles that it can threaten, it can actually begin to coerce. It can actually begin to induce changes in behavior. And unfortunately, they have been successful in getting some changes in behavior. And really, it’s kind of like the way President Trump talked about wanting a big bad military to not have to ever use it. The Islamic Republic loves to dangle the prospect of conflict, of its increasingly large arsenal of weapons to begin to foster changes in the regional force posture, in U.S. risk tolerance, in, even, the behavior of American partners in the region. So that- that low level dangerous stuff that always was a problem can continue cost-free.
DUBOWITZ: So obviously we don’t have to go all the way back to the Iran-Iraq War to see evidence–
TALEBLU: But I would love to.
(Laughter)
DUBOWITZ: We can, and I’d like to too. In order to see evidence of the regime’s aggressive use of these strategic weapons. We certainly have many examples, including last year in April and October where I think for the first time, Islamic Republic fired missiles, over 400 cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and drones at Israel. There’s also been attacks by drones against Saudi oil facilities and then obviously through proxies. I mean, they’ve used their proxies widely. Before get into the details of the actual systems, talk a little bit about the examples of where the regime has used missiles and drones in its wars in the Middle East.
TALEBLU: So, I think starting in 2017 we saw a resumption of a pattern, which was missile strikes during peacetime. After the Iran-Iraq War, after the Cold War, Iran had a couple of Scud systems that had fired at neighboring Iraq. Occasionally, not often, but occasionally in the 1990s at the base of a Iranian then-terrorist dissident organization, the MEK [People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran], which was based in Iraq at that time under the auspices of the Saddam Hussein regime. It was trying to engage in punishment, you know, punish them for alleged activities on Iranian soil. But then after 9/11, there was a real break in the firing of these systems up until 2017, where the revolution that we saw in some of Iran’s long range strike systems, some of them became more precise. They weren’t just weapons of terror, there were beginning to become battlefield weapons. And the regime began to use them in Iraq going against Kurdish positions, in Syria, going against ISIS. Responding to threats on the homeland like an ISIS attack, for example, by being able to hold targets abroad at risk. Standoff weaponry, things that you see from more hybrid, if not more overtly conventional militaries.
DUBOWITZ: But Behnam, just to be clear, you’re talking about Iran directly using these weapons, but for all those intervening years Iran was providing these weapons to its proxies?
TALEBLU: Well, Iran was engaging in low-cost proxy warfare. It slowly began to provide these weapons, particularly to the Houthis, particularly to Hezbollah. But what Iran began to arm its proxies within that intervening from 9/11 to 2017 was relatively low-cost systems that allowed these forces to stay in the fight, keep them in the fight, keep them as pains in the sides of pro-American forces, or the Israelis, or the Arabs, to increase the cost of continuing to compete against Iran and to force everyone to have to just manage the problem and never deal with solving the problem.
But starting in 2017, there’s this revolution in the risk-taking of the Islamic Republic and one missile strike begets another, targets against the Kurds, targets against ISIS, targets against others, such that once the US is willing to pull the trigger, and this was really one of the key achievements of President Donald Trump in term one, killing Qasem Soleimani, the chief terrorist mastermind of the Islamic Republic. The Iranians responded with 16 precision strike short range ballistic missiles at two U.S. bases. And 16 may not sound like a big number, and thank God no one died, but there were over 140 traumatic brain injuries. And there’s a debate based on the open-source literature, “did Iran warn? Did they not warn? Did we wait to vacate until the last minute?” There was an entire debate about this.
But moral of the story is the US had never taken that kind of a hit since the World War II. That was, at that point in time, January 2020, the biggest ballistic missile attack on U.S. forces in history. But then fast-forward to 2024, those strikes you mentioned, sir, the two direct attacks by Iran against Israel, one in April with medium range ballistic missiles, land attack cruise missiles, and drones. And then the more dangerous one in October, which constituted the largest ever in recorded history, single day ballistic missile operation. The Islamic Republic is making and breaking history. And one last note about 2024, which if you’re looking and pushing away from the table from Iran, just looking at military history, in the Cold War, neither the US nor the Soviet Union experienced this, and certainly India and Pakistan did not experience this in the post-Cold War period. But there were three times, not once, not twice, three times, that Iran directly attack the territory of a nuclear armed state without first having nuclear weapons itself. These are risks that no one has taken in recorded history, three times in one year, once against Pakistan in January 2024, and then twice against Israel in April and October 2024. And the real kicker is the projectiles, at least the medium range projectiles that Iran fired against Israel in April and October, many of them meet the range and payload thresholds of a nuclear capable system.
DUBOWITZ: Wow. That is an incredibly important point to emphasize, that they’re nuclear carrying missiles and they had conventional payloads, but they could just easily have had nuclear payloads. And then it just requires one getting through Israeli air defenses or U.S. air defenses to create an absolute catastrophe.
TALEBLU: That really is the fear of the 1% doctrine coming true. I know rightly, the US and the Israelis do beat their chest about the success of the intercepts back in April, depending on the video that you believe, anywhere from four to seven landed in Israel and then back in October, anywhere from about 32 to 35, depending on the video and depending on the open-source stuff you use, landed in Israel. But if you believe, like I believe, many Israeli national security planners on both or many sides of the aisle there believe, that Iran means what it says when it says, “Death to Israel,” and sorry, the Islamic Republic means what it says when it says, “Death to Israel.” And as former Iranian president Rafsanjani used to say that “Israel is a one bomb state.” All it takes is one bomb. So, imagine one of the four landing in April or one of the 32 or 33 landing in October, and it really would be, god forbid, game over.
DUBOWITZ: So, we’re in nuclear negotiations right now with the Islamic Republic. There’s been a lot of discussion about the nuclear issue, Iran’s expanding nuclear program. It’s been a lot of discussion about enrichment and enrichment capabilities. There has been some discussion, but not a lot, about Iran’s strategic missile program and that whether or not that will be part of the nuclear agreement. But certainly a criticism of the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] back in 2015, as you remember, because you were making that critique that the agreement was too narrow in scope, that it didn’t actually focus on Iran’s missile program.
And as you point out, a number of these missiles are nuclear warhead carrying. For the benefit of me and for the benefit of our listeners, I want us to become experts in Iran’s missile program, and you’re the best person to help us on that. Walk us through the Iranian missile inventory, the short range, the medium range, the long range, the ICBMs, the emerging technologies. Tell us about the systems, what is being used, what is being developed, and also talk a little bit about the kind of damage Israel actually did to Iran’s ballistic missile production capabilities back in October of last year.
TALEBLU: Sure. So, there’s a lot there. Stop me if it gets too crazy, but I will make sure that we cover all the bases because unfortunately, the Islamic Republic has invested in the entire spectrum of low and mid and high tier threats, and they’ve mastered what I call the “unmanned aerial threat spectrum.” So, you got on the low tier the cheaper stuff, mortars, and then you got slightly above that, rockets, slightly above that, drones, slightly above that, cruise missiles, and slightly above that, ballistic missile. So, this is the whole spectrum, and they produce these things on their own territory. They still are reliant on some foreign dual-use military grade material, but nonetheless, they can produce things for this entire spectrum at home. It simply actually is more cost-efficient for them to get things from abroad. That’s why, for example, you found Western components in Iranian drones that were sent to Russia for use against Ukraine.
They can reverse engineer, they can get things from China, but sometimes it’s just easier to buy and slip through the web of export controls. In terms of knowing the differences in the language, a rocket versus a ballistic missile, these are basically armed projectiles. A rocket is unguided, a ballistic missile is guided. Ballistic just means the trajectory, so it goes like a parabola. It goes up, it goes down. A cruise missile, for example, cruises at, basically, parallel to the earth. It can move, it can hug the contours of the terrain, but it’s lower and slower and it goes basically parallel. And a ballistic missile goes high and fast. So, think “low and slow” versus “high and fast.” That’s the cruise missile versus ballistic missile. For nearly two decades now, the U.S. intelligence community, in the auspices of the worldwide threat assessment, has been saying Iran is home to the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East, but also when you peel behind that layer, it’s also home to the most diverse.
Iran after the Iran-Iraq war, which again is the thing that birthed Iran’s interest in these ballistic missiles because the regime went to Syria, Libya, North Korea to get basically Russian Scud missiles, liquid propellant system, short range stuff – which, by the way, “short range” in military world is 300 kilometers to 1,000 kilometers. In military world, 1,000 to 3,000 is medium range, and then 3,000 plus to 5,000 is intermediate. And then 5,500 is intercontinental ballistic missile all in kilometers. Iran has close range, so zero to 300, short range, 300 to 1,000 and medium range, 1,000 to, they say, 2,000 because they’ve created an artificial cap on their ballistic missiles. They say it’s only limited to 2,000, but then they have a space program that actually the founder of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, this guy who is known as the father of Iran’s ballistic missiles, this guy who I’ve been over the world trying to get his memoirs, trying to get books written about him.
There’s tons of media interviews, documentaries, stamps, music, fan stuff created by the Islamic Republic about this guy. He died in a mysterious blast in 2011 that many believe was foreign sabotage, where he was working on a large diameter, potentially space launch vehicle that could be used as a future ICBM by the regime. But this guy’s name is Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, and just so you know where all of this stuff is going, on the grave of this individual, and I managed to find a photo of his grave and bring it into the monograph, the “Arsenal” monograph, it says, “Here lies somebody who wanted to destroy Israel.” So, these guys are not mincing words. That’s why when they have these artificial political caps on their missile ranges, that’s because they can hit what they want to hit within 2,000 kilometers. Average distance between Iran and Israel, depending on where you’re firing, is about 1,400 kilometers. And certainly, within that range of fire is the bulk of U.S. bases in the Middle East today, particularly the CENTCOM [United States Central Command] and AFCENT [United States Air Forces Central] and NAVCENT [United States Naval Forces Central Command] stuff in and around the Persian Gulf.
DUBOWITZ: And obviously they can hit our Gulf allies. And it appears, at least from some of the maps that I’ve seen with the sort of concentric circles of missile ranges, that they can hit parts of Europe.
TALEBLU: They can hit parts of Southern Europe, absolutely, depending on where they choose to fire from. Also, these aren’t things that don’t just stay in Iran. Sometimes they go out to proxies, for example, the Houthis, the newest member of this constellation of terror proxies, that the regime itself calls the “axis of resistance” is the only proxy of Iran with medium range ballistic missiles. So, one reason why the Houthis can land, thankfully not successfully, but can land ballistic missiles in Israel or fire at Israel is because within range, it’s 2,000 kilometers. The Islamic Republic has given the Houthis a 2,000-kilometer missile. So, the Islamic Republic has given a non-state actor state level military capabilities that many European partner militaries of ours, or even Gulf partner militaries of ours, don’t have. So, depending on who has what and where they’re firing from, these range fans look very different.
And also, Iran is always inching past these range fans. Like in 2019, for example, the Europeans who back then during Trump 1.0 and Max Pressure 1.0, they were dragging their feet, shall we say, when it came to sanctions and chose to still remain in the JCPOA. But they were calling out all of this missile evolution in Iran noting that “hey, there’s a Iranian system where if they just change the warhead weight, this thing will go 3,000 kilometers, not 2,000 kilometers.” So basically, moving from putting the parts of Southern Europe into risk, into Central Europe into risk. And this is the stuff that really makes the Islamic Republic a hybrid military actor, moves it out of the third world terrorist actor, and not yet within first world conventional military, but a hybrid military.
And don’t take it from me, take it from Iran’s IRGC aerospace force commander who knows where he is and is not outgunned. And in response to more powerful adversaries like the US, they say that the US clearly has the upper hand in capability, but they believe they have the upper hand in resolve, meaning willingness to fire. And Iran’s breaking and making of history in 2024, and breaking and making of history in January 2020, by responding against the US, by directly responding against Israel, landing ballistic missiles in Israel, and being able to tell the tale the next day having survived, that’s the stuff that makes you quite worried about “well, what would they do if they were retained a long range missile program and they retain domestic enrichment and they retain their terror proxies?”
DUBOWITZ: Okay, Behnam, so just a couple more technical points that I’m interested in clarifying in my knowledge of this. So, you’ve talked about the range. You’ve talked about the difference between the ballistic missiles, the cruise missiles. What is solid fuel, what is liquid fuel? You hear those terms thrown around a lot. And we’ll talk a little bit about a recent event that occurred in Iran that was very interesting, the huge explosion at Bandar Abbas recently. So, talk a little bit about the difference between solid fuel, liquid fuel, talk about what the Israelis have done to Iran’s ballistic missile production capability. And also, if you could tie in what happened at Bandar Abbas and this massive explosion into that.
TALEBLU: Sure. So, if I miss something, do call me out. But solid fuel versus liquid fuel, every missile has to be propelled by something. Technically, when you’re looking at liquid fuel systems, you’re talking about an engine. Technically, when you’re talking about solid fuel systems, you’re talking about a motor. These are small differences, but important to know. Liquid fuel systems literally use liquids as propellants to basically get you that thrust that you need to launch this projectile. Solid fuel ones require basically something solid, something like a mass to get you to burn through that and then create the thrust to launch this projectile. Now, some of the key differences is that many have said that solid propellant missiles have a greater military utility because you can fuel them.
You can put that solid mass into these missiles and let them sit there and you can move them around. So you can pre-fuel them and you can make them road mobile. And you’ve seen this transition in Iran’s short-range systems to almost all entirely solid fuel. And this is the stuff they were firing at the neighboring countries like Iraq and Syria, for example. They have solid fuel that goes into medium range as well and some of that is what they fired in Israel, but these are of the utmost military utility for the regime. It doesn’t mean that liquid propellant is irrelevant. The regime has been developing more of these more refined ones with warheads, with different payload thresholds. There’s an entire architecture there. And if you do have a really well-functioning liquid propellant engine, well that’s just more of an engineering hats off to you.
But in terms of the short-term military utility, worry about the solid fuel, especially if as the regime has been advertising to us for a little over a decade, it is claiming to have these underground depots. Sometimes it calls them “jungles of missiles” or “missile cities” where it can fuel them, move them around a whole host of tunnel complexes, and fire them from different positions in Iranian territory that could be harder to detect unless you have consistent overhead satellite monitoring. And what Israel hit in response to one of Iran’s larger missile barrages, the October attack, was a facility that actually mixes the components together for the solid fuel. So basically, there’s a gigantic mixer, think if you’ve ever seen a cement truck or one of those-
DUBOWITZ: Right. These are planetary mixers.
TALEBLU: Exactly, the planetary mixers, and they mix these components together. And then like a Duncan Hines or all those other pre-made cake brands, it’s a powder that you mix and when you put it into the oven, it comes out, it comes out firm. There are these powders that the Iranians really do need. And one of those powders that they had been importing reportedly from China, just this year, in 2025, in two different shipments, was a precursor for an oxidizer in the propellant. So not only has the regime’s solid propellant ballistic missile production taken a blow by having some of their major planetary mixtures taken offline due to these really military reprisal, but some of the precursors and chemicals that you need to produce that solid propellant was just, if you believe the regime, accidentally blown up in this major port, in Shahid Rajaee Port in Bandar Abbas in Iran, it was a major catastrophe.
I do believe in the Occam’s razor, or the simplest explanation, is the most likely in Iran, where much of the regime’s mid to upper echelons are not necessarily technically competent and could have done something that would’ve led this to be a major accident. An accident which has led to over 70 deaths, more than 1,000 wounds, and even some, almost hundreds of persons missing or displaced or unaccounted for, at least based on most recent reporting. So just because something is going boom doesn’t always mean it’s a foreign adversary.
DUBOWITZ: Well, I was going to ask you about the accusation that it’s a foreign adversary. First of all, my understanding is that in that October strike that Israel had severely degraded Iran’s ballistic missile production capability maybe to the tune of about 93%. That’s what I had heard from analysts and experts in Israel and elsewhere. So did serious damage to their ballistic missile production capability as distinct from their actual inventory, where they have this huge inventory of ballistic missiles and that the Iranians had to import from China new planetary mixers in order to replace the ones that have been destroyed by Israel.
And then this precursor that you talked about that exploded in the Bandar Abbas port causing all of this damage and casualties, that the regime itself hadn’t actually even accused Israel of doing that, though you would think there could be a case for Israel to do it in order to destroy the regime’s ability to reconstitute its ballistic missile production capability. So, there could have been a case to do that, but it doesn’t seem like Israel did it. And the regime is not even accusing Israel of doing it despite the fact that in not accusing them, it is assuming that this was done because of incompetence.
TALEBLU: Exactly, and just to put a slightly finer point on that, there was a joke in Iran between the April attack and the October attack because there was a limited Israeli military response in April, and there was a limited Israeli military response again in October, basically highlighting the vulnerabilities of the regime. And Mark, you’ve long studied the Iranian population. There was a time when they were pro-reform, going to the ballot box. Now we’re in the period of time when they’ve left the ballot box and realized how tightly controlled and rigged that is and they’re out in the street.
DUBOWITZ: “Death to the dictator.”
TALEBLU: Exactly. They’re crossing all the red lines; they’re grabbing the third rail with both arms. But another proof positive of them crossing these red lines is the jokes that were circulating between the April and the October strikes and the April and October retaliation. And I’ll just tell you one of them that may end up vindicating the thesis that this was not Israel in the Shahid Rajaee Port, given the high civilian death toll, because the joke is, as you know, “Contrasting to other war zones in the Middle East, how come Iranians don’t have to worry about being used as human shields?” And then the answer comes back, “The regime is not so foolish enough to put weapons under the houses of Iranians because they know that Iranians would first use the weapons on the regime.”
So, a qualitatively different threat environment in Iran. And I would have to say, at least from a distance, that Israel is very sensitive to that even based on what it struck in October, even based on its public diplomacy, particularly at the height of the post-October 7th Middle East. I think Israel is very sensitive that Iran is at least nominally one of the few, if not only, Muslim-majority nations that the vast majority of its population has been supporting Israel. You don’t have to take it from me. Allegedly one of the few places that you even see a Palestinian flag in Iran is a government office. It’s basically non-existent in society. It’s a drastically different contrast of American partners, friends, frenemies, allies, and even adversaries from Morocco to Malaysia.
DUBOWITZ: Yeah, no, I mean there’s certainly been a theme of this was podcast, not only do the majority of Iranians despise the regime, but that many, many Iranians admire Israel and maybe even look to Israel as perhaps the last hope to work on weakening and undermining and if history smiles on us, toppling the Islamic Republic. So, I certainly would think that the Israelis would be careful in terms of striking capabilities but minimizing civilian casualties. Let’s move on now to something that I think as Americans we should be very concerned about, because a lot of people have asked me over the years, maybe this is an Israeli problem, this is maybe a Saudi or Emirati problem, maybe the Bahrainis are concerned, the Egyptians, it’s a Middle Eastern problem, but why do we Americans need to be concerned, for example, about Iran’s expanding nuclear program? You mentioned before the ICBM program. Tell our viewers, listeners a little bit more about what an ICBM is and how far along is Iran’s program.
TALEBLU: Sure. So, an ICBM, it’s an acronym that stands for intercontinental ballistic missile. It’s basically a very, very, very long-range strike capability that states develop. They are countries that are not just in the West. Countries like India basically have ICBM capabilities. And India is a very interesting example because while the US and the Soviet Union built their space programs following an ICBM capability, India’s was basically in parallel or on the back end of the space launch vehicle capability. Sometimes people think just because North Korea is going in one direction, the Islamic Republic will go in one direction. No, no. Sometimes the Islamic Republic takes an aggregate approach to growing its missile power. And we should take a very close look at how a non-Western country like India used its space launch vehicle capability and foreign tech to basically move towards a major ICBM capability.
DUBOWITZ: Well, it’s interesting because I think you’ve obviously seen the parallels with Iran’s nuclear program, that Iran built a nuclear weapons program under the guise of a civilian nuclear program. The regime has always been very good at providing excuses.
TALEBLU: Exactly.
DUBOWITZ: These are sort of dual-use tests. This is dual-use equipment and dual use capabilities. It’s not just for military, it’s for civilian. It’s not just for nuclear; it’s for conventional military. So, what you’re referring to on the ICBM program is build an intercontinental ballistic missile, again–
TALEBLU: Under the guise of a space launch vehicle capability.
DUBOWITZ: And what would a space launch vehicle capability be used for? Putting satellites in space?
TALEBLU: Putting satellites into low earth orbit. The Iranians are actually partnering with the Russians. Back in the early 2000s, the Russians had put the first Iranian satellite into low Earth orbit. The Iranians have had a really mixed track record of success of getting their own domestically produced satellites up there and out there. And even when they do get up there, sometimes they kind of tumble off. They’re not providing the feedback. But Iran does have stated goals to create not the Russian contrast to the GPS system that we have here, the GLONASS [Globalnaya Navigatsionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema] system, but the Iranians are talking about or have been talking about a local positioning system. And while they would say this is for agriculture and farming and whatnot, if you have excellent mapping of terrain in your local area, well, that will really help you with military targeting.
Make your drones, your ballistic missiles, your cruise missiles much more accurate. So even if you buy the scientific explanation of just putting satellites into space, there are military dividends, there are military applications. The only thing we have “unknown unknowns” about, to kind of borrow a Donald Rumsfeld-ism is how far along is the regime on the reentry vehicle technology? Because there are so many parallels, almost one-to-one, with space launch vehicles and ICBMs. The staging, the thrust, the boosters, launching these things. But a space launch vehicle, an SLV, you basically go and you don’t have to worry about protecting the payload anymore because you’ve had your satellite enter, in the case of the Iranians, low earth orbit. But for the ICBM, you need to have to leave and return and survive the rigors of reentry at that speed and at that distance to deliver that payload to the target.
And that is really one of the unknown unknowns. How far along is the regime in this? Because in everything else, the tech is very, very close, if not one-to-one. And you mentioned the perfect cover, the scientific cover for the military. This is a regime that can walk and chew gum at the same time. There is a liquid propellant space launch vehicle program being administered by the Iranian Space Agency, which is thankfully sanctioned, but there is also an entirely military solid propellant space launch vehicle program being run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force. And these are the guys who have launched those ballistic missiles at Americans, at Israelis. They have their finger on the trigger of the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East. And these are the same guys who, by the way, can threaten and have threatened U.S. positions in the Middle East. So, this isn’t just about threatening Americans potentially in the future at home or threatening our European partners in the future at home. These guys on a daily basis benefit from the threats made against our force posture and our assets in the Middle East.
DUBOWITZ: So just to clarify, because I think it’s important, folks sometimes forget this. I mean, an ICBM is not– first of all, it’s not designed for a conventional payload. You don’t build an ICBM so you can deliver a conventional payload. You build one to deliver a nuclear payload. And second is, Iran doesn’t need ICBMs to hit Israel, U.S. forces, Gulf allies, or even Europe. They need an ICBM with only one target, and that’s the American homeland.
TALEBLU: America, and I would add Europe, and the movement of our adversaries in this other direction now hypersonic. This is really just talking about the maneuverability and the speed of these projectiles. Now there’s hypersonic ballistic missiles, for example, that we’re looking at, what potentially the North Koreans may be developing, what the Russians may developing.
DUBOWITZ: The Chinese.
TALEBLU: The Chinese, absolutely. But that capability is now beginning to change the debate about ICBMs because perhaps you can conventionally deliver a long-range strike asset with a missile all the way around the world. So, our adversaries are beginning to develop these capabilities that can kind of reach out and touch the American homeland. And what happens in Moscow, what happens in Beijing, what happens in Pyongyang, doesn’t remain confined to Moscow and Beijing and Pyongyang, especially when you look at not just the 1980s, but the 1990s, the transition of the flow of whole systems to just component parts that really allowed Iran to build this defense industrial base that Washington and Europe is trying to squeeze and contain and roll back now.
DUBOWITZ: So, before we get to what we’re going to do about this, I’d say a few more words about this kind of “axis of aggressors,” as we call it at FDD, of Iran and China, Russia and North Korea, and the layers of cooperation between them. Talk a little bit about the cooperation on the missile side. How has Iran benefited from its relationship with China, Russia, and North Korea?
TALEBLU: Well, North Korea has really given Iran the first medium-range ballistic missile. So, the reason that Iran was able to develop projectiles at all that could reach Israel, like we saw back in April. You know, Iran fired the liquid propellant Ghadr and the liquid propellant Emad, medium-range ballistic missiles, both of which are based on the Shahab-3, which is based on this North Korean model that Iran got in the late 1990s called the Nodong-A. So North Korea was really essential in providing Iran with the capability for the regime to reach out and strike Israel from its own territory and at a distance. So, in the 1990s, these countries really midwifed capabilities that we are now dealing with today.
Pushing away from the table, China, for example. Look at Iran’s anti-ship cruise missiles. Iran has a whole array of anti-ship cruise missiles that allows it to replicate the Chinese and the Russian anti-access area denial that we worry about, with respect to their coastline and with respect to the Chinese, if there’s a potential war with Taiwan, be it in 2027 or wherever else. Every single Iranian anti-ship cruise missile is based on a licensed or unlicensed copy of a Chinese anti-ship cruise missile.
This is a crucial point. When you look at, for example, some of the tech that the regime has been benefiting from to go in the 1990s and 2000s towards developing their own space launch vehicles, it’s, again, building on the parts that they’ve received from North Korea and Russian tech. So, these countries have really– it’s like the Dean Acheson memoir, “Present At Creation.” These countries were really present at creation for Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal with the capabilities that allow it today to be not wholly, but relatively self-sufficient.
And when I look at this axis today, Mark, you’ve gone several times mentioning the nuclear issue. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Iran is the only non-nuclear one. Yet when you look at its track record against way more conventionally superior adversaries, it seems to be punching well above its weight against America, against Israel even without a nuclear weapon. That’s the real irony, that the weakest link, the one without the nuclear weapon, keeps getting basically away with murder in a way that I think there would be more costs. And there have been more costs in some way imposed on the destabilizing behavior of the Russians with respect to Ukraine or North Korea, particularly in the past.
DUBOWITZ: Well, it’s interesting. I mean, certainly I think everybody would admit today that the Islamic Republic is weaker than it’s been ever maybe, certainly since the end of the Iran-Iraq war. And it has taken massive blows to its air defenses, to its ballistic missile production capability, to its axis of resistance as a result of Israeli military activity. And certainly, the economy is suffering as a result of regime incompetence and a centralized economy that’s incapable of delivering the levels of prosperity that the Iranian people deserve, but also because of Western sanctions. And so weaker than it’s ever been. And yet we’re entering into negotiations once again and we’re seeing this movie over and over again.
TALEBLU: How many times?
DUBOWITZ: Let’s talk about the negotiations because again, a lot of the discussion, rightly so, about Iran’s nuclear program. But as you’ve pointed out, Iran’s missile program is lethal, developing, certainly expanding, and a key component of the nuclear three-legged stool.
TALEBLU: Exactly.
DUBOWITZ: Right? It’s fissile material, it’s the warhead, and it’s the missile. So, going into negotiations, what advice would you have for President Trump and lead negotiator Steve Witkoff and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others who are going to be negotiating, are negotiating with the Islamic Republic on these technical issues with respect to constraining Iran’s missile program?
TALEBLU: So, I would say three separate things, one to the president, one to the special envoy, and one more broadly about negotiations of missiles. To the president, sir, they tried to kill you, several times. Best not to forget that because an agreement with a regime that has tried to kill you is not going to be worth the paper it’s written on. The reason they’re trying to kill you is because, unlike in the past, your policy was super successful in generating pain against them in record time. [The] president shattered so much conventional wisdom and taboos on Iran. One, he pulled the trigger against Qasem Soleimani when two previous U.S. presidents didn’t, and World War III did not come about. He sanctioned the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization when others didn’t, and World War III did not come about. He actually supported the Iranian people, if only rhetorically and politically, when the bulk of the conventional wisdom in DC was, when Iranians are protesting, don’t support them because it’ll be the kiss of death.
He created such a high bar, Biden and the Europeans had to meet that rhetorical high bar come Women, Life, Freedom in 2022 and 2023. And the coup de grace is maximum pressure. He unilaterally brought back a whole host of sanctions and expanded them over time and showed in record time that U.S. unilateral sanctions could generate more macroeconomic pain against the Islamic Republic than a decade plus of multilateral sanctions. So, for all those reasons, sir, they’re trying to kill you because you were effective against them. Don’t junk your leverage so quickly. Listen to yourself. Listen to the “Art of the Deal.” Never be afraid to walk away. This is regime that, as you said, is immensely weak. Push away from the table. Make the regime sweat, make the regime come to you. It will be a real shame to be making history as the president is making today by going after oil refineries in China but still being seen as wanting a deal. This undermines the economic leverage that he’s at once creating. So that’s my advice to the president. Special envoy-
DUBOWITZ: And by the way, just before we get to the special envoy, you’ve met the president before, correct?
TALEBLU: I have briefly met the president as a New Yorker, as a native New Yorker, when I was super young. On the weekends, I used to walk with my parents down Fifth Avenue to the earliest entrance of Central Park and feed the ducks as a wee lad. The ducks didn’t like the bread that I threw because it was pita bread. The ducks liked Wonder Bread. I remember this specifically. But as a kid, you had to go to the bathroom, especially after walking so long on Fifth Avenue and there weren’t many public bathrooms. Long story short, sometimes I would stop into Trump Tower and use the restroom, which was available then.
DUBOWITZ: Was it gold?
TALEBLU: I don’t remember if it was gold, but there was a lot of gold around me. I don’t know if the bathroom itself was gold. I don’t think so. And one time I was back in the lobby walking up and my parents were there waiting for me, and they were pointing in the corner of this man I had seen on TV for quite a long time. It was Donald Trump, and I actually went up to him and got to shake his hand, and I think I was five or six at the time.
DUBOWITZ: Well, it’s been a long time since you’ve met with President Trump. I would hope you would meet with him again, and if he’s listening or other people close to him are listening, I think that’s great advice for President Trump. So, tell us your advice to Secretary Rubio, lead negotiator Witkoff, specifically as they walk into these negotiations in general, your advice, but specifically over this most deadly weapon in the Islamic Republic’s arsenal, its missile program.
TALEBLU: To Special Envoy Witkoff, to the new head of the technical negotiating team, Mr. Michael Anton, think of this as a carpet bazaar. And I know this can sound like an orientalist trope. My father had been in this business for many years. There are lessons to learn from haggling with the Iranians because unfortunately, and it pains me to say this as an American, unfortunately, every time Iran has entered negotiations bilaterally with Washington with a weak hand, it’s left with a strong hand because it’s sensed that we want this thing and we are more invested in the process than they are, and that’s when they jiu jitsu and flip the script.
So, one of the lessons from the carpet bazaar is overvalue what you’re giving and undervalue what you’re getting. In Persian, we say bezan too sare mal, hit the commodity on the head. You basically need to make the regime want to give you the centrifuges, want to dismantle because they will be totally physically dismantled by an American and or American-Israeli military strike tomorrow, if they don’t do this. He’d have to make it appear as if it’s in their interest.
And then another is, highlight your exit option. The person with the more powerful exit option in negotiations gets to control the dynamic. The president has immense exit options here, can make the regime sweat. Remember those economic sanctions that we talked about? In term one of the Trump administration, once Iran’s President Rouhani and thrice, Iran’s oil minister Mr. Zangeneh said that the oil sanctions of Trump at that time had done more damage to Iran’s oil exports than the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war. This is leverage we cannot afford to junk. The US needs to realize who is the superpower and who is the supplicant and not let the regime jiu jitsu its way through.
And then tying missiles into this. You may note, sir, that in some of our writings at FDD in 2015, we were for a bigger, broader, better deal. In 2025, we are only for focusing on nuclear. And the reason is, well, why negotiate with Hezbollah when the Israelis in 2024 have shown that there is a military option? There is a military solution to a military threat. So, keeping it focused on nuclear, well, how are the Iranians going to deliver their–
DUBOWITZ: Well, right. Nuclear is missiles as well.
TALEBLU: Exactly. Precisely. There’s always a smaller bomb. There’s always a different shaped warhead. Why run the risk with this regime? Treat all of its nuclear-capable missiles, defined very broadly internationally as 500 kilograms over 300 kilometers, as nuclear-capable systems.
DUBOWITZ: 500-kilogram payload–
TALEBLU: Yes.
DUBOWITZ: –over 300-kilometer distance.
TALEBLU: This is from the Missile Technology Control Regime. You can use this as a metric to determine nuclear versus non-nuclear capable, even though again, there’s always a smaller bomb, but let’s take this international standard, let’s apply it and let’s make the regime first have to declare what it has, stop producing, stop testing, and then come up with a phased approach for reduction, cutting, destruction, or transfer. And this happened with Libya, and I know many people are in the business today of knocking the Libya model saying, in the end, US or NATO airstrikes supported the population or gave cover to the population. I don’t believe that the US needs to be in the business of ensuring the longevity and the survival of the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism because if they had an opportunity to, forgive me, screw the US over, they absolutely would. I believe that this is a negotiation that lasts as long as you want it to have to last.
And again, the Islamic Republic has to be made to realize that it is the supplicant in this not the superpower, and that it is going to have to declare everything that can carry a nuclear weapon and bring that into a nuclear-only conversation. We can’t afford, with immense respect to then, I think, Undersecretary Wendy Sherman, to create these artificial distinctions about “not a ballistic missile per se,” I think was her comments in 2014 or 2015 to the U.S. Congress, but just about the warhead. We can’t afford to be so narrow, so parsimonious and treat a political problem as a mere technical problem to be managed with an equation of the right number of missiles, the right number of sanctions, the right number of centrifuges. Our proliferation problem, our missile problem is part and parcel of the larger problem we have with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the president, the special envoy, whoever cannot afford to forget that.
DUBOWITZ: Right. And again, I mean, it’s just sort of basic here. If you’re going to have a deliverable nuclear weapon, you need the fissile material, enriched uranium or reprocessed plutonium, you need a warhead and you need a delivery vehicle. You have to deal with all three elements or you’re not dealing with Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
TALEBLU: Exactly.
DUBOWITZ: Behnam, we’ve talked in detail about Iran’s missile program. I feel like we’ve gotten a real master’s class on what the missile program is. Let’s talk a bit about Iran’s drone program because they’ve certainly used drones against Israel. They used it against Saudi Aramco when they took down Saudi oil facilities, and they’ve been sending drones to Vladimir Putin to be used to kill Ukrainians. Tell us a bit about the drone program. Is it as advanced as the missile program? Is it as big as the missile program? It certainly seems to be quite deadly.
TALEBLU: I’m glad you mentioned the drone program because this year U.S. intelligence reporting, it always says that Iran has the largest ballistic missile arsenal. This year it added that Iran has the largest drone arsenal in the region as well. This is critical. Iranian drones today, as you mentioned, are not just in the Middle East and they’re also not just in Europe. Iranian drones today are on four different continents. They’ve been used in war zones in four different continents. They truly are a sign of the regime’s global reach of a low-cost, high return on investment military system. They’re in South America, they’re in Sub-Saharan Africa, they’re in the Russia-Ukraine War, and they’re all across the Middle East. The stuff the regime is firing and the stuff the regime is transferring on the cheap to the Houthis, to the Iraqi Shia militias, and to Lebanese Hezbollah, for example.
The most popular drone, the Shahed class, the “one-way drone” or the “suicide drone,” they fire that at vessels in the past, oil tankers. They’ve pioneered that firing the Shahed class at Saudi Aramco directly from Iranian territory. They’ve employed the Shahed in the direct strikes against Israel. Fortunately, all of the Shaheds in the April 2024 strike were intercepted by American or Allied or Israeli Air Forces. So, drones in this layered threat package that we’re talking about, remember the whole spectrum of unmanned aerial threats, especially if they’re the suicide drones or the one-way attack drones that the Pentagon calls them. They basically are what we say is the poor man’s cruise missile. If the cruise missiles are expensive and they go low and slow and parallel to the earth, well the drones will basically do the same thing. They can make more noise. There’s piston and propeller powered drones like the Islamic Republic has, and they’re beginning to transition towards some more jet-powered ones, which make them more effective, potentially slightly quieter depending on where you are.
But drones are low and slow. And if they go in first because most, not all of them, some of them can loiter, they can go around air defenses, they can strike them from areas that they’re not covering, and then basically render a broader area, be it a civilian area or a military area, more exposed to the ballistic missile strikes. Iran’s ballistic missiles are becoming much more precise, but they’re not 100% there yet. And one way you can maximize the power of your ballistic missile punch, is if you first go in low and slow with your land attack cruise missiles and your drones. And this way, if you strike the assets that are designed to defend an area, well then, you’ve left an entire area exposed and at the mercy of your quantitative advantage, whether that’s a quantitative advantage against Saudi, against Israel, against U.S. forces of your ballistic missile arsenal. And this is how you can get more bang for your buck.
DUBOWITZ: And that was exactly the sequence that they employed against Israel in–
TALEBLU: April.
DUBOWITZ: –April of last year.
TALEBLU: And the Russians are employing it in a similar sequence as well. If Europe’s major tool and even part of the Biden administration’s tool against Russia was these tough sanctions designed to put real pressure on Russia’s ability to produce enough munitions to stay in the fight, well Chinese tech and assistance, North Korean ballistic missiles, Iranian suicide drones have kept Vladimir Putin in the fight, allowing him to engage in layered attacks to strike its civilian targets and erode the will over time of the adversary to stay in the fight. So, this is exactly the way, not just Iran is fighting, but other members of the axis of aggressors are fighting. They’re using military tools to achieve political ends, and they want to erode the will of the Ukrainians, the Americans, the Europeans, to keep sanctioning, to keep fighting, to keep providing weapons, to say that they have an unending barrage of weapons. And if the Russians can get it on the cheap from their newfound strategic partner of the Iranians, why not?
DUBOWITZ: So, Behnam, I want to ask you a question about North Korea because it’s come up a few times in this conversation, the North Korean missile technology that was so helpful to the Islamic Republic as it developed its own missile arsenal. Certainly, the North Koreans working very closely with the Russians, North Korean troops killing Ukrainians, North Korea that has intercontinental ballistic missiles and a nuclear weapons arsenal. It’s always puzzled me, and maybe we don’t know, why the Islamic Republic has not bought nuclear warheads from the North Koreans in addition to the nuclear missile or the missile technology that they built from North Korea. It’s probably an incredibly difficult intelligence challenge to figure out whether Iran has done it. But if you could just speculate, why would they not do that? What’s the reason that they would want to develop their own domestic capability on the warhead and not just buy warheads from the North Koreans? Or certainly from the Chinese or Russians? But let’s focus on the North Koreans for a second.
TALEBLU: Sure. If we’re focusing on North Korea, which gets a lot of bang for its buck by selling military technology and a ton of other technologies around the world–
DUBOWITZ: In some respects, it’s the only thing it has to export to generate hard currency.
TALEBLU: I think that and coal or something.
DUBOWITZ: Maybe.
TALEBLU: But yeah, very few exports. This may be on the North Korean side, a prized possession. So maybe they’ll sell everything except this. You know, states are hesitant often to sell the most essential thing that they believe is for their survival. So North Korea may be keeping that simply off of the buyer’s shelf. The Iranians may not have asked for it out of fear. For example, remember back in Libya, what led to the Libya model being a model was actually Libya being caught with some imports back in, I think, the fall of 2003 that led to the deal in the winter of 2003. So, the Islamic Republic may fear that even though we are here sitting saying it’s a hard intelligence target, they may fear that all the intelligence channels are penetrated and that they don’t want to get caught.
I mean, when you look at the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program from a distance, it’s not a rush to the bomb. It’s a path to the bomb as safe as possible. It’s a very different proliferation challenge than Pakistan or North Korea, for example, which is a dash, or will eat grass. This is one foot in, one foot out designed to exploit everything from international law, to the will to pull the trigger, everything.
But to go back to the North Korean example, perhaps the Iranians think that they do want to do this on their own. For everything that we’ve talked about today that has a security element, there is a status element as well. The regime, despite being in many ways rejectionist of the West, also wants the status recognition from the West that “I was able to do this myself, despite multiple American presidents, Democrats and Republicans saying, ‘No, you can’t do this.'” The boon this gives revolutionary regimes is insane.
I mean, every time we talk about ballistic missiles, and we have to be careful about it, the regime is listening because it is trying to use our domestic discourse for a status dividend at home. Status and security are the two drivers of the nuke program and the missile program, and perhaps this status, plus the challenges of getting it, plus potential limitations from the North Koreans, aggregate together to make the Iranians want to do this at home rather than get it from abroad. But we don’t know what we don’t know. And God forbid the scenario you pointed out being true and the regime having a bomb in a basement, that would be checkmate.
DUBOWITZ: Yeah. The other thing of course, is you don’t buy the warhead, but you bring in North Korean nuclear scientists, you bring in Russian nuclear weapons scientists, you bring in this technical talent from abroad to help you advance the warhead. So, Behnam, I think that’s great advice to President Trump and to Secretary Rubio and lead negotiator Witkoff. I certainly hope they take your advice under advisement because it’s essential that not only do they not give up on the fissile material that Iran needs to develop nuclear weapons and this enrichment capability that Iran is going to exploit to weapons grade but also don’t give up on the importance of restricting this massive arsenal of missiles and of drones that has caused such havoc in the Middle East. So, Behnam, thank you. This has been a great conversation. Like many of the episodes, selfishly, I do these because I want to learn, and I learned a great deal about an element of Islamic Republic power and capabilities that I knew not enough about. So, thank you. Appreciate you being on the show. Definitely want to have you back.
TALEBLU: Thank you for having me. It’s always a pleasure.
DUBOWITZ: That was Behnam Ben Taleblu. We break down Iran’s military capabilities and strategic doctrine today. How Tehran has been turning quantity into quality: More precision, more reach, and more threats to U.S. forces, partners, and interests. We’ll keep tracking Iran’s growing threat network and breaking down what Washington must do to push back. I’m Mark Dubowitz, and this has been “The Iran Breakdown.” I’ll see you next time when we break it down again.