There are essentially two classic methods, aircraft in the form of long range bombers and missiles. Iran has no military aircraft of the right class unless the rumor of their purchase of Tu22-M Backfires is for real. Even that probably is pointless as it is ~ 10,000km (5495 NM) from Tehran to Washington DC which is half again the range of a one way mission in a Backfire. Then there's missiles. The Iranians have something on the lines of the Pakistani Shaheen 2 (itself derivative of North Korean Taepodong missile) called Shahab-5(b). Range on these (best case assuming 1000KG payload) is thought to be ~5500km. It can hit most of the EU from Tehran, in addition Jerusalem (and basically all of Israel) is easily in range. It is NOT clear to me if this is in service or predicted (and the FAS data is from 2002). There is also one on the drawing board (notional?) with 12000KM range and that puts the East Coast of the US in range.
Given these limitations conventional means to hit the U.S. are right out for the present (although Israel is well founded in their dislike for an Iranian Bomb). But even more important is that an ICBM or Aircraft is trackable to the attacker. Although you may think Allah is on your side, jumping the U.S. in a attributable fashion when you have say 1-5 weapons vs. the U.S. with 7000+ warheads (as of 1997, down to 5000 or so these days I believe) is folly. Those warheads represent over 2045 MT of deliverable destruction. That is a bit much even for folks with a death wish and a fairly far out eschatological world view to look at head on without having major qualms about whether those are 72 virgins (or figs) promised in the Quran are for real. Even they know the old saw that the Almighty favors the side with larger artillery and will think long and hard before lobbing something like that at U.S. soil in a fashion that leads directly back to them.
So that brings us to unconventional means. Here I've see three basic suggestions
- Stuff it in a panel truck and get it into the US Via the borders.
- Put it on a ship in a container and park it in a harbor (say Long Beach) and set it off
- Put it on a large aircraft (cargo or alleged passenger) fly it over a US city and set it off
There is also a variant of 2 where you put that conventional missile on a ship and launch from said ship turning it into a really crude guided (well vaguely guided) missile cruiser.
The most obvious form of unconventional delivery method is the truck. Given the weight from my earlier post we're not talking anything bigger than an average UHAUL or Ryder Truck. This is nothing new, Terrorists have been doing this since Beirut. The big trick here is getting the bomb into a truck. Not the physical task, but getting the bomb or its unassembled parts into the US. It would probably be easier to bring it into Mexico or Canada, get the truck there and then deal with the issue of the border. There are places (especially on the US/Canada border in northern New England) where you wouldn't have to off road far (like across someones yard) or even at all to cross without being inspected. Doing it at a crossing is harder as there may (I hope) be monitoring for nuclear material. More critically if you're 2-4 guys with a rental truck and funny accents and maybe even looking a bit Middle Eastern you are going to get thoroughly eyeballed by the US customs agents. More concerning than the US would be Europe or Israel. There the truck can be loaded in Iran and go direct by road to its target. The Israelis would have the same issues our border guys would so that seems somewhat unlikely. Europe is another issue. A bunch of guys claiming to bring furniture to Paris or Munich for their uncle/cousin/brother are going to sound quite reasonable.
Your next choice is aircraft. Because we're assuming a large weapon and a 10000KM+ journey this probably has to be a devoted aircraft, perhaps one used for cargo. You could try to just ship it as cargo if its on the small side, but then you have the issue of timing the detonation in some fashion. Otherwise you end up blowing up Pease Trade Port or Newark Airport instead of New York or Washington. You then also have further run ins (a least I hope you do) with radiological monitoring. However, if you've got a plane and crew to waste (as well as a bomb technician or two) this shows some promise. The main issue is at present there are no direct flights from Iran to the US. However Iran has recently requested direct flights to the US (link). I think given the current state of the world allowing any Iranian flagged craft or Iranian originated craft into U.S. airspace is a probably a really bad idea.
Last of all there are ships. Cargo ships and containers seem a very easy way to get the weapon into a major port. Again there is the issue of detonating the weapon. I wonder if you couldn't put a couple folks in the container with sufficient food water etc. to get them to the US where then they act as a human fuze. The other option is the one I mentioned briefly the missile cruiser concept. Launch the missile from somewhere outside coastal waters of the US and now your under range IRBM's can reach much of the continental US. This does have some technical issues, in particular accuracy goes majorly south as the inertial navigation hardware probably presumes it is launched from a nice stable piece of ground. The pitching deck of a ship adds lots of uncertainty even in mild sea states. There is an old joke that close enough only counts in Horseshoes, Hand grenades and Nuclear weapons. However, you'd rather not shoot for New York N.Y. and get Bennington VT. or Buffalo or even Toronto (You wouldn't want those fierce Canadian retaliatory forces unleashed upon you).
One thought I've seen is to use the ship based weapon for an EMP shot (E.G at Barking Moonbat Early Warning Systems) This has some merit (for example the aiming problem is less severe). However it has some technical issues. The Skipper at BMEWS talks about a 50 Megaton explosion at 300 mi above the center of the US. However that's a ludicrous discussion for the Iranians (or the North Koreans). First of all a 50 Megaton weapon is not within Iran (Or North Korea's) capacity in even the near future. That's a weapon in the same class as the largest weapon ever the Tsar Bomb. They've got low kiloton range (10-20) WWII class weapons at best, and EMP depends directly on the gamma output of the weapon. A 20 KT weapon is going to be more than 3 orders of magnitude less powerful and induce 3 orders of magnitude less current than a 50 Megaton one. Add to that that although a missile may have a 5500 KM range it probably can't shoot 300 mi straight up . These missiles are like the early Redstones used for the suborbital Mercury shots. You're talking perhaps 60mi. of altitude at the top of the shot. So although I love BMEWS stuff this scenario of his is pure unadulterated hysteria for the present. One could use a weapon like I've describe to disable a region perhaps 300 mi. in radius. There's two reasons that it is unlikely to happen:
- Taking out say the Northeast US via an EMP attack is a bit like an amateur sucker punching Mohammed Ali in his prime. Yeah, you may break his nose, but you are in for the beating of lifetime. This would be an attributable attack with weapons of mass destruction. U.S. Policy has always been that an attack on US soil with WMD will be retaliated to massively with WMD and the only WMD we have any more come in 300KT increments.
- This doesn't fit their fantasy ideology . They want to kill someone, they want see that iconic mushroom cloud rise over the symbol of US power (NYC or Washington DC). Nothing short of blood sacrifice will bring back the twelfth Imam and start the rise to power of the world caliphate in their lunatic eschatology.
If we were facing a sane rational opponent (say the British or the Australians) one might expect a disabling EMP attack. Of course if it were the Brits or the Aussies the issue could probably be sorted out over a beer (or two, or six) and the only fights would break out over which brew to serve and what temperature to serve it at.
My own feeling is that terrorists are going to favor either the truck or shipping container options. A nation state is going to lean toward the commercial airliner or more likely the off shore kludged up guided missile container ship until they get the ICBM's in gear. Next time I'm going to think about how to defend against this kind of threat.
Tregonsee (L2) Signing out for now
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