This is John Batchel, a conversation with colleague Ben-Benthaliblu, Senior Fellow Foundation for the Defense of Democracy.

We begin about nukes, but we turn to the missiles and the drones that Iran is turning out for customers, such as Russia, such as even North Korea, I learned from Benham.

There's Ben-Benthalablu on on the Iranian factory turning out missiles that are sought by

hostile Russia, hostile North Korea, and others.

Much more of this tonight.

It's a really mixed bag.

I mean, the Iranian missile program really started, as you know,

and we've covered in the monograph that I published back in 2023 called Arsenal that details

the origins, the evolution, and the future of the Iranian ballistic missile program, which

today is the biggest in the entire Middle East, and setting very dangerous precedence, by the way,

we can get into that a little bit later.

It started with little copies of Syrian, Libyan, and North Korean copies of Soviet technology,

but then later morphed in something of its own with component parts from Russia and China,

with gyroscopes and all these other kind of computers and motherboards

and wiring to actually take a whole host of rockets and move to them into the class of missiles,

which is to basically get guidance and control technology on these increasingly longer-range

strike capabilities. So there really is something distinctly Iranian about these capabilities.

They have things the North Koreans don't have. The North Koreans have things they don't have.

They've improved upon certain North Korean systems. The North Koreans have, we believe, look to Iran

on the drone front. The Russians have absolutely looked to Iran on the drone front. More importantly,

the Iranians have for the first time in history

proliferated close-range ballistic missiles into the European continent.

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