Why is the national debate now swirling around a prospective nuclear deal with Iran entirely missing a key point? Because it is all but ignoring a huge proverbial elephant that is not in the room but should be: Iran’s nuclear missile programs. These are part and parcel of what makes the Islamic Republic’s growing nuclear weapons infrastructure so menacing. Ignoring Iranian missiles is nothing less than an original sin of omission in the Obama administration approach to trying to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions by negotiating a comprehensive grand bargain. Far from being a peripheral problem, this lapse represents a fundamental flaw that is likely to bedevil the viability of any agreement that emerges from these negotiations.

To be sure, many other important issues regarding the so-called P5+1 (Britain, China, France, Russia, United States plus Germany) talks with Iran are now coming to the fore of public awareness. In spite of the all too predictable media fixation on a pair of recent partisan brouhahas that have flared up between the Obama administration and congressional Republicans—the invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to address Congress on the Iran talks, and then the open letter to Iran from forty-seven Republican senators stressing the constitutional limits of any agreement that is not approved by Congress—the national press deserves credit for also focusing on the actual substance of the deal that is starting to come into focus. Recent coverage has explored many arcane and interrelated issues at an impressive level of sophistication. These include the agreement’s legal status, duration, and durability, the scope of its restrictions such as the number of centrifuges allowed and disposition of existing stocks of nuclear fuel, and even highly technical aspects of the Iranian weapons program that are not covered such as neutron initiators, and fusing, arming and firing systems. For his part President Obama himself has gone out of his way to stress the importance of verification as a critical element in any agreement, although it is unclear how intrusive a process the President deems necessary or what verification mechanisms Iran may be willing to tolerate. These are all important factors that taken together will rightly shape judgments about any deal that is reached. In all of this debate and analysis, however, there is scant notice that Iran’s nuclear missile programs do not seem to be anywhere in the mix.

Although details filtering out of the high level talks in Switzerland have been sketchy, it is readily apparent that the Obama administration has all but ruled out trying in any serious way to include missile restrictions, including for Iran’s most threatening medium and long range ballistic missile programs that would presumably therefore remain in development. The President and his team seem to have decided very early on—or perhaps even preemptively—that pressing Iran for missile restrictions was a negotiating bridge too far in wooing Supreme Leader Khamenei.

Instead, the administration has concentrated on what, to be fair, is widely understood by almost everyone as being the core issue; namely, Iran’s ability to produce nuclear explosives. On its face, this seems a perfectly reasonable approach based on the logic that, if they are not armed with nuclear warheads, then the missiles themselves are relatively harmless. Of course, this same logic can be turned around, since it is also true that nuclear warheads are far less worrisome without missiles to carry them to distant targets. The larger point, however, is that this is not an either-or proposition. To the contrary, because nuclear weapons and delivery systems are integrally linked, any nonproliferation framework must deal with both to have any real chance of lasting success. Here are three big reasons why those missing missiles matter.

Testing Iranian Intentions

Not having an indigenous medium or long range ballistic missile program is arguably the single most reliable indicator of any state’s peaceful nuclear intentions and vice versa. In practice the lengthy time horizons, vast expense, and international taboo of such programs only make sense in the context of needing them to deliver nuclear payloads. Nuclear weapons and missile programs have thus typically been developed hand in glove, and no state that has not aspired to have nuclear weapons has ever opted to sustain a medium or long range ballistic missile program. Over time, this correlation has proved to be absolute. Litmus test, anyone? 

Iran steadfastly continues to deny that it has or has ever had any desire to obtain nuclear weapons, notwithstanding prior shenanigans with inspections, data, secret facilities and so forth. Rather, the Iranian regime claims that it wishes to retain significant nuclear enrichment capabilities for entirely peaceful and legitimate energy production needs. Well then: do the missiles tell a different story?

After more than a quarter century of unrelenting effort, Iran now boasts by far the largest and most multifarious missile arsenal in the Middle East and is dauntlessly working to expand these already formidable capabilities in terms of range, accuracy, and survivability. At the same time, Tehran appears recently to have abandoned any pretext that its muscular missile programs might be related to innocent space launch ambitions (which had always been a dubious fig-leaf, lacking any credible economic or geospatial logic). Put simply, the scale and nature of its wide ranging ballistic missile programs has long belied Iranian protestations of peaceful nuclear intentions. If the Iranians refuse to abandon or even curtail these programs as part of a larger nuclear framework arrangement, and with no plausible answer for why they would still need these capabilities if not to deliver nuclear weapons, it speaks volumes about their ultimate goals. If the United States and its negotiating partners have demurred from putting Iranian intentions to this test, then that also speaks volumes. We have seen this movie before (as have the Iranians), when the Agreed Framework that the Clinton administration negotiated with North Korea in the 1990s tried to resolve concerns about a suspected covert nuclear weapons program while deferring any restrictions on overt missile programs. As it turned out, both continued apace. Contrast this to the experience of sincerely repentant nuclear proliferators like South Africa and Libya, which renounced nuclear weapons and their associated missiles in tandem.    

Simplifying Verification

Missiles also matter for verification. Covert nuclear weapons programs are relatively easy to hide even when inspection mechanisms exist. Consequently, effective verification of nuclear nonproliferation agreements requires highly intrusive protocols that in the event still may not provide a high degree of confidence that cheating will always be detected in time. This reality has been repeatedly demonstrated over the past few decades. Iraq successfully pursued an extensive covert nuclear weapons program during the 1980s despite being subject to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections, until it was revealed in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War. Iran likewise successfully hid covert nuclear facilities in the 1990s and early 2000s, again under the noses of IAEA inspectors, until these facilities were revealed by exile opposition groups. In the late 2000s it was Syria’s turn to hide a covert nuclear weapons facility from the IAEA, until Israel bombed it to the world’s attention. In this context, over a decade of Iranian experience playing skillful cat-and-mouse games with the IAEA does not inspire a great deal of faith in the prospects for effectively verifying any P5+1 arrangements through cooperative verification measures.

By contrast, medium and long range ballistic missile programs are relatively easy to detect at stages of development and testing that occur well before operational deployment, using only national technical means (NTM) that require no good faith cooperation. Existing deployed missiles and related infrastructure are rather large and distinctive and therefore likewise difficult to hide from NTM in any significant numbers. Add cooperative verification mechanisms to the mix, such as inspections and/or bans on unsupervised flight or static testing, and very high confidence is possible that any cheating can be detected. Indeed, it is important to recall that the successful nuclear disarmament treaties between distrustful Cold War adversaries, embodying President Reagan’s “trust but verify” maxim, did not actually limit nuclear weapons as such. Instead, for the sake of simplifying reliable verification, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (START) covered delivery systems (that is, missiles and bombers) rather than the warheads they carried. Using this same proven approach, by including missile restrictions as part of any nuclear deal with Iran, would greatly simplify verification challenges in detecting and demonstrating any cheating down the road.         

Putting the Break on Breakout

Finally, missile restrictions would slow down Iran’s capacity quickly to field capable offensive nuclear forces in the event that it ever reneges on an agreement or merely waits out any time-limited provisions. In terms of such “breakout” potential, one of the gravest concerns about any agreement allowing the Iranians to preserve a robust nuclear reprocessing capability is that, without even needing to cheat, it could allow Iran to tiptoe up to nuclear weapons threshold status. In other words, as long as Iran is allowed to maintain an enrichment program for peaceful purposes, it will retain a latent capability that could quickly be put to use to produce weapons. Once the centrifuges start spinning to enrich nuclear fuel to weapons grade, it is simply a matter of time, more or less, depending on the number of centrifuges.

As the North Korean case shows, it is easier to develop nuclear explosives than reliable long range missiles capable of delivering them. Whereas the North Koreans have conducted successful nuclear explosives tests (albeit with mixed results), they have not yet mastered an intercontinental missile capable of hitting the continental United States, nor the ability to deliver a nuclear warhead on any range missile. Iran likewise is still pursuing long range missile capabilities and has yet to develop missiles that can hit the United States or even Western Europe. A ban on any further Iranian development, testing, and production of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles would lengthen the timeline between an Iranian decision to renounce an agreement and its ability to deploy nuclear armed missiles, in particular any that could threaten the United States and its key allies outside of the Middle East.  

So Why Not Include Missiles?

In the coming days, we will learn if the Obama administration and its negotiating partners are able to close a nuclear deal with Iran on a framework for a comprehensive settlement and on which terms. If so, then the fundamental question to assess is whether this development reflects a strategic decision by the Islamic Republic to forswear nuclear weapons now and for the foreseeable future, or if instead it is nothing more than a tactical accommodation on the road to becoming a nuclear weapons power. If the Iranians are sincere in renouncing any past nuclear weapons ambitions, then they should have no reason to retain their formidable existing arsenal of missiles, and certainly even less so to pursue even longer range and more capable systems in the future. Thus, if it turns out that the Iranians have indeed not been required to restrict their missiles as part of a comprehensive deal, even while this arrangement purports to satisfy concerns about Iranian nuclear weapons development, then it begs the obvious question of why they would still have any need for such missiles? What a pity if they are not even asked to explain this paradox.        

David A. Cooper is the James V. Forrestal Professor and Chair of the Department of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. He is a former career senior executive at the Department of Defense who served as the Pentagon’s Director of Nonproliferation Policy and Director of Strategic Arms Control Policy and as the U.S. Representative to the 2nd United Nations Panel of Governmental Experts on Missiles. Opinions expressed are solely his own.