Well you would think that it is peace in our time. I refer to the latest movement on the Eastern Europe BMD saga. According to the New York Times

…Mr. Gates said that while the United States would not grant Russia a veto over missile defense sites in Europe, the Bush administration was willing to guarantee that neither the radar proposed for the Czech Republic nor the 10 missile interceptors proposed for Poland would be turned on until Iran had proven it had a missile that could reach Europe.

“When we see flight testing that leads us to believe the Iranians are close to developing a capability to hit our allies in Europe, that would be the point at which we would operationalize the sites,” Mr. Gates said.

That could mean that the missiles would not be placed into silos until then, although the specific details have not been worked out, he said…

That’s very sketchy. It states that Gates has proposed to keep the X-Band radar and the Silos empty until “the Iranians are close to developing a capability to hit our allies in Europe” but then it states that the proposal could be just restricted to keeping the GMD silos empty.

If the latter the thing still would be of concern to Moscow on grounds that the X-Band radar could be used to track the telemetry of Russian ICBM tests and take a good look at the point of flight when the RV separates from the bus. If it includes keeping the Radar in the dark you would think Moscow would like some verification when it counts.

Another problem is that the definition of when Iran is considered to be able to hit “our allies in Europe” is not very clear. The other interesting thing is that according to these purported Intel documents on Iranian RV work (the bit about the inner core of an RV as discussed in the last IAEA safeguards report) Tehran is interested in developing a warhead for the Shahab 3 not the Shahab-4 or 5. The latter two is known to us by way of speculations for the most part. And we still don’t really know if these docs are legit.

In fact it is highly unlikely that Iran would want to develop a capability to hit Hungary or Romania if they seek to develop a deterrent capacity by way of European targeting.

So we should be talking here testing of the Shahab-5. A capability to place a nuclear payload on the Shahab-5 is way off and I suspect not what Gates is offering. Iran claims it doesn’t really want to go on and develop the 4 and 5 (although Shahab-4 is sometime spoken of in terms of a SLV). Notice also that the 4 and 5 are heavily based on the Soviet SS-4 not SCUD technology which is a factor when we look at timelines and Iranian capability.

This is an ambit diplomatic move that really is not meant to be taken seriously. Besides we know from Postol and so on that the architecture to meet any Iranian ballistic missile threat to Europe need not be based in Poland and the Czech Republic.

On these matters Team Bush is a lame duck moreover.


By the way just a point on Fogbank. Only a few US warheads in the current stockpile use Fogbank in the interstage section. The W76 is one hence the issue with respect to RRW. However, it is not really clear whether the W76-1 does use fogbank. If not the argument against using this for RRW by undermining Stockpile Stewardship becomes stronger.