Despite our impressive June 26 "Midnight Hammer" B-2 round-trip delivering penetrating weapons to destroy at least some of Iran's underground nuclear infrastructure, there are reasons to worry about Iran’s continuing ability to build and/or retain nuclear weapons to threaten attack.
Edwin Lyman described one way Iran can still reach a nuclear capability in the July 2, 2025 Bulletin of American Scientists . . . by exploiting 1940s technological capabilities.
He also emphasized that arms control measures were needed to counter current uncertainties, presumably including that those large nuclear weapons would still pose major delivery problems.
While I'm not opposed to arms control activities, having spent a significant portion of my life on such efforts, I much more favor eliminating Iran’s repeated explicit threats to attack America, the "Great Satan," as well as Israel, the "Little Satan."
With that perspective and while noting the merits of Lyman's arguments, the reader should consider a decade-old Newsmax article in which several well-informed experts and I noted that, even then, we should not have assumed Iran did not already have at least a limited deliverable nuclear weapon capability.
To quote an important, and I believe still true, bottom line:
"Regardless of intelligence uncertainties and unknowns about Iran's nuclear weapons and missile programs, we know enough now to make a prudent judgment that Iran should be regarded by national security decision makers as a nuclear missile state capable of posing an existential threat to the United States and its allies."
We noted then that Iran already "had orbited several satellites on south polar trajectories passing over the western hemisphere from south to north" . . . as if practicing to elude the then existing U.S. Ballistic Missile Early Warning Radars and National Missile Defenses, which were oriented to detect and intercept threats coming from the north.
And we noted the cooperative efforts of Iran with North Korea, which now has an ICBM delivery capability for its nuclear weapons.
Shouldn't we assume that Iran has already learned how to do the same as North Korea . . . and perhaps already has a deliverable nuclear weapon capability that has escaped even the Mossad’s most impressive intelligence knowledge?
I applaud the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in calling for a return to on-site monitoring of Iran's nuclear weapons capabilities, and urge that those efforts also include evaluation of Iran's ability to launch nuclear weapons on ballistic missiles to attack the United States.
At least, we now should be better prepared to counter such a launch, provided we are alert and ready to engage such trajectories . . . e.g., with our Aegis BMD capabilities already at sea and ashore.
Hopefully, those now fashioning President Donald Trump's Golden Dome will take advantage of and improve these global capabilities . . . so far, seldom mentioned in articles about current plans.
In this context, we should also recall that our Aegis capability was President George W. Bush's chosen system to shootdown a threatening satellite in the February 2008 Burnt Frost event, first making explicitly clear Aegis’s anti-ICBM capability.
And over the past two decades, we have deployed several Aegis Ashore sites to complement the Aegis sea-based global capability.
As argued in my July 23rd Newsmax article, this capability realizes the first step in the "Global Defense, First from the Sea and then From Space" strategy advocated in the 1983 Heritage Foundation effort chartered by Ed Feulner.
The second stage we now need is the Space Defense that can be realized via the president’s Golden Dome effort to protect the American people.
As argued in my last article, it also could defeat long-range missiles.
From China.
From Iran.
Several of our two-decades-old points are still valid, with the added fact that any deliverable nuclear weapons Iran had then may have been moved to other locations.
Of course, I am aware of the renowned capabilities of the Israeli Mossad and know that it would be a difficult undertaking to accomplish such movement and maintain secrecy for many years.
And as concluded over a decade ago, I would again emphasize: "Holes in the National Missile Defense need to be patched, and the U.S. nuclear deterrent modernized."
Henry F. Cooper is a Ph.D. engineer with a broad defense and national security career. He was President Reagan's Defense and Space negotiator with the Soviet Union and Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) Director under President George H.W. Bush. Read Ambassador Cooper's Reports — More Here.
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