Iran’s missile program was born of weakness in the early years of the Islamic Republic. Now the question is whether it is formidable enough to head off a military confrontation with President Trump.
Tehran unleashed a barrage of around 500 missiles that struck civilian and military locations in Israel last June but did little strategic damage. Though Israel pounded Iran’s missile launchers and storage sites during a 12-day war in June, the regime emerged from the bruising conflict with much of its remaining arsenal intact.
More important, Iran learned how to get more of its missiles past Israeli and American defenses as the war went on.
It is threatening to fire them again on a broader set of targets around the region if Trump orders an attack. That has raised the pressure on the White House, forcing it to worry about Iran’s ability to target Israel and U.S. forces, as well as friendly Arab countries in the Persian Gulf and the wider region.
Tehran still has an estimated 2,000 midrange ballistic missiles that can reach across the region, The Wall Street Journal has previously reported. It also has significant stockpiles of short-range missiles capable of reaching U.S. bases in the Gulf and ships in the Strait of Hormuz, as well as antiship cruise missiles.
“In the absence of any meaningful air force and air defenses and with decimated allies and nuclear capabilities, Iran’s ballistic missiles now constitute the backbone of Iran’s deterrence,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, senior director of the Iran Program, at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “They are like a Swiss Army knife for the regime—for coercion, defense and punishment all at once.”
U.S. military leaders are taking the threat seriously. Trump put off plans for a mid-January attack on Iran at the last minute after being convinced the U.S. didn’t have enough forces in the region to carry out the decisive strike he wanted while dealing with an Iranian response and managing escalation.
The Pentagon is moving more missile defense systems to the Middle East, including to the Persian Gulf and to other Arab countries. “If they don’t make a deal, the consequences are very steep,” Trump said Friday, referring to Iran.
Ahead of talks aimed at heading off a conflict that began Friday in Oman, the U.S. had demanded that Iran rein in its missile program as part of the price of a deal that would also address its nuclear enrichment and support for regional militias like Hezbollah and Hamas. But Iranian officials have refused to discuss any restrictions on the country’s stockpile.
The thousands of ballistic missiles Iran built over decades by copying Russian and American technology have been used before to target air bases, energy facilities, desalination plants and cities in the region. Tehran has sometimes limited its retaliatory strikes, even giving brief advanced notice of its targets to signal to the U.S. that it wasn’t seeking a wider war.
Iran is counting on the uncertainty over whether more missiles would hit their targets this time to deter another military confrontation, analysts said.
This past week, hard-liners in Tehran said Iran’s missile program was the main reason the U.S. hasn’t attacked Iran and had opted for talks instead.
“The U.S. has returned to negotiations humbled,” said Brig. Gen. Yadollah Javani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ political bureau, as he exhibited a new model of medium-range ballistic missiles.
Building Iran’s missile arsenal was the life’s work of Amir Ali Hajizadeh, a figure so important that Israel killed him in an airstrike during the opening salvo of its surprise attack last June.
During the 1980s war with Iraq, Hajizadeh joined the IRGC unit that was tasked with making ballistic missiles. Most countries refused to sell them to Iran, so the unit started copying Soviet and North Korean designs, and later American Stinger and TOW antitank missiles captured in Afghanistan.
In 2009, he took charge of Iran’s newly created Aerospace Force and propelled Iran’s missile efforts to a new level. To that point, Iran’s arsenal had been mostly short-range, inaccurate rockets. He oversaw the development of missiles capable of precisely striking targets at a distance of 1,000 miles—well within range of Israel.
He was “an ideological hard-liner who was obsessed with the idea of destroying Israel,” said Saeid Golkar, an authority on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard who teaches at the University of Tennessee.
In 2015, Hajizadeh was a leading opponent of a pact that curbed Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. That year, he took to Iranian television to unveil “missile cities”—vast formations of ready-to-launch rockets buried deep under mountains.
After Trump ordered the 2020 strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Hajizadeh engineered Iran’s response by attacking an American base in Iraq with a volley of drones, the Iranian government said after the missile mastermind was killed. Days later, an air-defense unit operating under his watch accidentally downed an Ukrainian airlines flight near Tehran, killing all 216 onboard.
Iranian-designed drones were used by Iraqi militias to attack U.S. troops, and by Hamas and Hezbollah to attack Israel. Its missiles were launched by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis to attack Saudi foes, Red Sea shipping, American warships and Israeli cities.
Iran saw this as a way to protect itself by using allies as a shield. “The foreigner around us is insecure, but Iran is at a peak of stability,” Hajizadeh said in a 2015 state TV interview.
“He is the one that had the biggest say in the way that Iran approached its strategy and fought its wars,” said Afshon Ostovar, associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.
He was killed on June 13 in Israeli strikes that decapitated much of Iran’s military leadership.
Write to Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com