Iranian Missiles

There is no technical code to crack: Iranian missile names are symbols. Quranic and religious terms (Sejjil, Fattah), battles and bombed cities of the Iran–Iraq war (Khorramshahr, Dezful), dates of the revolution (Khordad 15) — with trailing numbers that loosely track range or series. Western analysts therefore sort the arsenal by lineage instead: which airframes descend from the Soviet Scud, which from North Korea's Nodong and Musudan, and which are genuinely indigenous solid-fuel designs.

One lane per line of work, one dot per system entering service. The story reads left to right: imported Scuds answering Iraqi fire in the war of the cities, a liquid MRBM decade built on North Korean designs, the pivot to solid fuel after 2010 — quicker to launch, harder to preempt — and the precision and hypersonic claims of the 2020s, tested against Israel in 2024, in the June 2025 war and again in the war that began in February 2026.

Everything liquid-fueled traces back to two imports. The Scuds bought during the war of the cities became the Shahab-1 and -2, later refined into the finless Qiam. The North Korean Nodong became the Shahab-3, whose stretched and lightened descendants — Ghadr, then the precision-warhead Emad — are the MRBMs Iran has actually fired at Israel. A third, heavier line derives from the Musudan: the Khorramshahr series, whose latest iteration is named Kheibar.

Solid fuel changed the strategic math: no fueling trucks, no launch window to preempt. The Fateh line grew from a guided artillery rocket into a family of road-mobile precision missiles — Fateh-110, the composite Fateh-313 and Raad-500, the Dezful — that struck US bases in Iraq in 2020. The two-stage Sejjil brought MRBM range to solid fuel, and the Fattah-1 claims a manoeuvring, allegedly hypersonic warhead. Note the plateau in the chart: it reflects the roughly 2,000 km ceiling Khamenei imposed in 2017, a political decision rather than an engineering limit — and one Iranian officials said was lifted in October 2025, after the June 2025 war.

Iran's cruise line began with a smuggling operation: six Soviet Kh-55s bought illegally out of Ukraine in 2001, reverse-engineered into the ground-launched Soumar and its Paveh and Hoveyzeh derivatives. What makes the family strategically significant far beyond its single entry on file here is the cruise-missile know-how it seeded: the 2019 Abqaiq strike on Saudi oil facilities used the smaller, separately developed Quds-1 — claimed by the Houthis, but attributed to Iran by the United States, Saudi Arabia, France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Sanctions made air defense the arsenal's weak leg: Russia only delivered the long-promised S-300 in 2016, and the domestic Bavar-373 is its analogue. Below them sit the Khordad 15 and a layer of short-range and counter-drone systems. The June 2025 air war was their first hard test, and the war that began in February 2026 a far heavier one: in both, Israeli aircraft operated over Iran with growing freedom as the campaign went on.