A New Phase of the North Korean Threat
On March 20, Iran launched two intermediate-range ballistic missiles from its territory to Diego Garcia, the joint U.K.-U.S. military base in the Indian Ocean. Fortunately, both missed.
Analysts were surprised that Tehran’s regime possessed a missile that could reach the isolated facility, more than 2,000 miles off its coast. After all, in 2017 then Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei imposed a limit of 2,000 kilometers on the range of the country’s missiles.
So what did the Iranians launch? “It’s a Musudan,” Bruce Bechtol, coauthor of Rogue Allies: The Strategic Partnership Between Iran and North Korea, told me, referring to a North Korean intermediate-range ballistic missile.
“Tehran calls it a Khorramshahr, but it’s really a ‘Son of Musudan,’” he points out. “Iran got this missile from North Korea in 2005.”