Iran cannot strike Los Angeles or San Diego with a nuclear weapon, regardless of President Donald Trump’s offhand comments on the campaign trail.
Iran has no known nuclear weapons and no known missiles capable of reaching either California city. Tehran is roughly 7,500 miles from California, far beyond the approximately 1,200-mile range of Iran’s longest-range ballistic missiles, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The nonpartisan Arms Control Association, which tracks nuclear proliferation around the world, said it’s hard to tell how Iran’s missile program could recover after being damaged by US strikes. The bombed sites have not been inspected by experts, though uranium for the program likely remains buried deep within rubble.
“Iran is still a proliferation risk, but its nuclear program is not an imminent threat,” Kelsey Davenport, the group’s director for nonproliferation policy, told Business Insider.
Trump raised the prospect of an Iranian strike on California in offhand remarks at a Republican rally in Nebraska on Monday, as he defended the war against Iran as “a small price to pay for keeping the world safe, keeping our country safe.”
“They can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego,” Trump said.
Iran has long-range conventional missiles and drones capable of striking US troops and infrastructure across the Middle East. Throughout Operation Epic Fury, Iranian strikes killed six troops in Kuwait in March, and other strikes have seriously damaged US military facilities throughout the Middle East.
But those systems are only capable of regional strikes, and are not nuclear weapons.
The United States has struck Iranian uranium-enrichment facilities twice since last May, including at the start of Operation Epic Fury. Before those strikes, Iran was moving closer to the ability to produce a nuclear weapon, but had not produced one. Davenport said that while the remaining amounts of uranium are unknown, military strikes alone cannot erase Iranian nuclear knowledge.
“Iran will have the capabilities to build a bomb, regardless of how the war ends,” she said.
If Iran, or any other adversary, eventually acquired a nuclear weapon and a missile capable of delivering it across the ocean, locations most likely to be at risk might be major cities and sensitive military sites, though such an escalation would be unprecedented for any country, and unlikely, Davenport said.
She pointed out the inherent dangers of escalation, also known as mutually-assured destruction. Using a nuclear weapon could invite nuclear retaliation, a primary reason those weapons have not been used since World War II. “That’s an escalatory spiral states are not going to be eager to climb,” Davenport said.
And, countries frequently still carry out major conventional attacks without crossing the nuclear threshold. Israel, the US, and Russia are all nuclear powers that have attacked adversaries without using nuclear weapons.
For more than a decade, Iran has also relied on asymmetric tools against the United States and its partners, including cyberattacks. Iranian government-linked hackers have targeted US banks, universities, businesses, and government agencies. A group linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps previously claimed responsibility for hacking systems that controlled US water treatment facilities.
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