State television said that on Tuesday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards showed off an intermediate-range ballistic missile that can move at up to 15 times the speed of sound.
President Ebrahim Raisi praised the hypersonic speed of the new missile, saying it would increase Iran’s “power of deterrence” and “bring peace and stability to the countries of the region.”
The ceremony in a closed area that it didn’t say anything about. Several of the top military leaders were there, including General Hossein Salami, who is in charge of the Guards.
IRNA said, “The Fattah missile has a range of 1,400 kilometers (870 miles), and its speed before hitting its target is 13 to 15 times the speed of sound.”
Like slower ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles can have nuclear weapons. When Iran said in November that it was making one, Rafael Grossi, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was worried.
Grossi said, though, that he didn’t think the new missile would “have any effect” on talks with Iran about its nuclear operations.
Talks between Tehran and the world’s most powerful countries about renewing a 2015 nuclear deal that was ruined when Washington left it on its own in 2018 and put new sanctions on Iran are currently stuck.
Since then, Iran has stopped following the strict rules it agreed to for its nuclear activities and has made it harder for the IAEA to watch. This is a strategy that it is only slowly changing.
Unlike regular ballistic missiles, hypersonic ones fly low in the atmosphere. This lets them reach their targets faster and makes it less likely that current air defenses will be able to stop them.
When the program was announced last year, Guards aerospace chief General Amirali Hajizadeh said the system was made to “counter air defense shields.” He also said he thought it would be decades before a system could be made to stop it.
Israel is Iran’s biggest enemy, and most people think that Israel has its own nuclear arsenal that it hasn’t told anyone about. Israel has multiple air defense shields to stop subsonic and supersonic rockets.
Last year, North Korea tested a hypersonic missile, which made people worry about the race to get this technology. At the moment, Russia is in the lead, followed by China and the United States.
Since March of last year, Russia’s war against Ukraine has used the Kinzhal hypersonic missile more than once.
