For the West, Iran's missile buildup will soon become a problem - By Hans Rühle

Many Europeans reject the U.S. government's planned missile shield. Yet attention may be too narrowly focused on current threats. Not all potential terrorists are visible today.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin placed the planned U.S. national missile defense system at the center of a wide-ranging condemnation of contemporary Western security policy at a February conference in Munich, he also prompted questions asking whether a threat even existed that would justify this kind of project. At the time, officials in European capitals assured the public that Iran was proven to have missiles with a maximum range of only 2,000 kilometers.

This statement, which is based on present calculations, falls short of the real problem in all respects. The American anti-missile system currently under discussion was not designed with the present threat in mind. Its construction is scheduled to begin in 2008 and to be completed in 2012.

There are good reasons for this time frame. According to the current knowledge of every intelligence service in the Western world, North Korea and Iran, among other countries, will probably have long-range missiles by 2015 at the latest.

North Korea began building up its own missile production based on Soviet Scud missiles as early as the 1970s. In recent decades, Iran has sold enhanced Scud missiles to Iran, Libya, Pakistan, Syria, and probably Egypt. Ninety-five percent of all currently available short and medium-range missiles are derivations of the Scud, which the Soviet Union set up on the territory of any potentate in the world for decades in exchange for cash.

In 1998, North Korea tested a ground-to-air variant of the Taepo-Dong I. Although the missile's third stage malfunctioned, all observers agreed that Pyongyang would someday develop the ground-to-ground variant of this model into a true long-range missile. In July 2006, North Korea tested the even more powerful Taepo-Dong II. This test may likewise have failed but the missile's signature characteristics unmistakably indicated a range of 6,000 to 10,000 kilometers.

This shows that in recent years, a remarkable change has taken place in the proliferation of ballistic missiles. The first phase of these special relationships, in which a supplier sells a deployment-ready system to a buyer for cash, is now over. Today, an array of states are now closely cooperating to develop, produce and test ballistic missiles. This kind of relationship has demonstrably existed for many years between North Korea and Iran. It is no coincidence that the Iranian Shahhab-3 is a derivation of North Korea's No-Dong.

It would be a miracle, then, if North Korea's advanced missile technology were not duplicated very soon in Iran. North Korea, after all, has an urgent need for oil. Iran could then largely do without conducting its own tests and simply refer to North Korean data. Therefore, in the future one will no longer be sufficiently able to gauge the effectiveness of a country's ballistic missiles by evaluating only this country's tests.

Another novelty is the method of masking a missile's performance parameters by testing a rebuilt ground-to-air version instead of using the actual ground-to-ground configuration. Both North Korea and Iran do so. Iran's most recent missile test was not an attempt to carry a payload into space. It was a test of a projectile for ground-to-ground use.

Who would ever object to peaceful space research? This kind of disguise gives missile builders the opportunity of cooperating with states that do not or cannot engage in an overtly military project. Russia may no longer be helping Iran build ballistic missiles yet it continues to provide sustained support for Tehran's "space program."

Western intelligence services indicate that North Korea recently delivered 18 BM-25 systems with a range of 2,500 to 3,500 kilometers to Iran. Also, Tehran bought 12 cruise missiles from Ukraine between 1999 and 2001 that have a range of up to 3,000 kilometers.

The activity came to light in January 2005. An investigative committee appointed by the Ukrainian government confirmed the deal but played it down by claiming the systems were "not complete." Earlier, however, Iran had already bought Ukraine's facilities for producing cruise missiles.

The cruise missiles Iran bought were systems with conventional warheads. Their basic version, however, is the KH-55 which, during Soviet times, carried a 200-kiloton nuclear warhead. Iran shouldn't have that hard a time making the Ukrainian products nuclear-capable.

Yet Iran is not the only possible candidate for threatening the United States and Western Europe with ballistic missiles from the Middle East. Pakistan is a country where even a brief takeover by Islamists, a "Talibanization," would open up the appalling prospect of nuclear weapons and delivery systems falling into the hands of potential state terrorists. The Pakistanis do not yet have long-range systems but by concentrating on solid-fuel missiles, they have a viable approach. Since Pakistan maintains contact with both North Korea and Iran, we can assume that it, too, will have missiles with a range of between 6,000 and 10,000 kilometers by 2015.

- Hans Rühle was director of planning in the German Defense Ministry from 1982 to 1988.