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Work in progress (Mar’06). Have to seek out some previous postings elsewhere for incorporation here. Enjoy the rest. As titled. Gathered up some notes and images I’ve worked up along the way, while discussing the situation re Iran. Putting these here mostly for reference, with a bit of context. Not an attempt at a cohesive argument, simply some links and substantiating information. Use it as you will. Please don’t hotlink the images, use your own bandwidth.
A few key issues in the Iran debate -
Nuclear weapon program. Their Bushehr reactor - Iran sits on some of the largest oil and natural gas reserves in the World, yet they claim their new reactor facility at Bushehr is ‘for peaceful energy needs’. FAS / Global security link for Bushehr.They actually already have an energy-producing reactor [have to link details of this], but apparently this doesn’t suit their needs. Instead they’ve contracted with the Russians (who need the cold hard cash) to build them a new reactor. There are two types of nuclear reactor - ‘Light’ and ‘Heavy’ [read more here for details]. A ‘Light’ Reactor would suffice for peaceful civilian needs, such is the standard design. Instead, Iran has specified a ‘Heavy’ Reactor, which produces energy AND plutonium byproducts suitable for refining into weapons-grade material. AND Iran has chosen a facility whose total megawatt output [need link for this] is insufficient for any major civilian need. It is thus there primarily to generate Plutonium for their weapons program. Nuclear enrichment - already underway, using their native uranium deposits. [enrichment process link] The short version is this: you convert uranium ore (‘yellowcake’) into a gaseous product, spin it in centrifuges and reconvet to a solid, yielded an enriched product. This is an alternate path to weapons-grade nuclear materials. Iran is doing both, just as fast as they can. In the meantime, they’ve bee refining their ballistic missiles to carry their payloads much farther. Like most totalitarian states around the globe, they started with a Soviet design, further modified by North Korea. Iran’s latest / current multistage rocket is the Shahab-3 [need link]. In December of ‘04, the BBC website published a ‘there there, don’t worry your little heads’ -tpye article about this missile, which included a graphic of the range of the missile, falling short of even Israel - ‘there, see, not a threat to europe, why worry’. Utter rot. I immediately noticed that they had either sloppily or deliberately made two significant errors in their graphic. First, the Shahab-3 is a mobile system, a la its SCUD progenitor. The Beeb had constructed a graphic with the missile being launched from Tehran, in the center of Iran, showing the missile’s range fan barely extending outside her borders. Secondly, they used the lowest range estimate for this missile - some 1300km instead of 1600km, nearly a 20% difference. So I constructed a graphic showing both the Beeb’s (mis)representation and a more realistic representation of the longer range and its extension from NW Iran, several hundred km from Tehran. Here is that graphic:
As you can see, the difference is substantial, and suddenly Israel, Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Ukraine are all under a very real threat. This was over a year ago (as of this writing), with the Shahab-3. In February of this year (2006) came word (iirc, as fallout from the AQ Khan network’s exposure) of Iran and North Korea working out some hardware and technology transfer for the Norks’ TaePoDong-2 missile. A device with a much-increased range over the Shehab-3. This missile has an estimated (and demonstrated by a launch by North Korea clear OVER Japan’s southern island) range of at least 3700km [need FAS/Global link]. I expanded my previous artwork to include these new developments:
Note that the area under threat includes the bulk of continental Europe, Russia, almost all of North Africa, and in a later graphic, all of India. Now, NOW the UN makes noise about Iran. Here’s the other grahic, based off a GoogleEarth screencap -
Topping this all off, we have the remarks of both the current and the former presidents of Iran, openly promising the destruction of Israel and [rafsanjani link in here somewhere]promising to do so with nuclear hellfire.[links to Ahmeddinnerjacket’s comments, rafsanjani’s] Anyway, their work progresses and I very highly doubt there will be any ‘testing’ of the Iranian nuke. They’ll deliver it to Tel Aviv via speedboat from Lebanon. And if they’ve got time to make two, up the Potomac on a hijacked sailboat.
Iran and the Strait of Hormuz Much hand-wringing lately about this topic. I encourage such folks to go research what happened there in the mid-80s, the last time Iran tried to threaten / close that route. They go their ass kicked up between their ears, only scoring a couple mine hits and losing every engagement they were in, badly. Including the Gulf oil platforms they’d tried to turn into strongpoints. The USN repeatedly engaged and defeated the Iranian “Navy”. Then go look up the particulars of the USS Vincennes engagement, wherein the ship was engaged in a multithreat surface action when an unscheduled out-of-flightpath jetliner bore down on them and was shot out of the sky. Plenty of conspiracist sites out there talking about it, so choose your sources wisely. And at least look for the USN Proceedings magazine writeups of the events (the USN’s monthly professional journal) Anyway, much is made today of Iran’s ownership of Silkworm anti-ship missiles [FAS]. While doing some investigation on the geography of the persian Gulf and the Strait, I found out just how truly huge the waterway is, how much relative room there is for supertankers to navigate, and wha tthe effective ranges were for the anti-ship missiles. I once again whipped up a quick graphic. the highlighted region represents the max range of a Silkworm. The vertical lines represent the maximum distance a supertanker would be ‘under the guns’ as it were.
Call it roughly 300mi, with a supertanker traveling an average of 20knots / hr. ~15hrs to transit the area of maximum danger. We already ‘own’ that battlespace, and have for quite some time. We have bases right at the center of this map, in Dubai UAE. And west in Qatar, and Iraq itself. This area would be under constant surveillance and a Carrier-based CAP. And at the first hint of overt offensive action by Iran, or the eve of any by us towards Iran, I would expect that there would be a resumption of the Colation’s convoy procedures for oil tankers. A combination of Frigates, Guided-missile Cruisers and Destroyers, steaming alongside such a convoy, interposing themselves between the tankers and the Iranian shore would provide ample anti-missile defense. And our aviations assets would swiftly ensure that there would be no further launches from that point or launch vehicle. I’m not sanguine about it, or overly optimistic. I just feel that Iran would be devasted by our response to such an attack and that we would very quickly dominate the Strait. And in the meantime, tankers traversing the Strait could heave to or slow down enroute to provide a period of only a couple days for such a domination to occur. Not much of an inconvenience to global oil markets, I’d say. Commodities traders would certainly go apeshit, and pump prices would go up up up, but I say ‘so what?’ It will be temporary. And maybe then we could even find the national will to develop sufficient alternate oil supply from our own peaceful shores to abandon persian Gulf oil. I’ll do another page for Oil / Energy someday soon. that stats are quite interesting. persian Gulf / Saudi oil holds our attention and obiesance FAR out of proportion to its value.
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