"Works both ways, sir," Wolfe pointed out. "If they secure the main towns along the Musand'am coastline, it'll be easy for them to keep others from coming in."
"Have they hit the UAE yet?" Drake wanted to know.
"Apparently not," Stewart replied. He nodded at the paper in Drake's hand. "That's all we have so far.
Maybe all they want is the Musand'am peninsula. They might figure that if they have that, they have all they need to completely control the straits."
"They've got to know Washington's not just going to let this pass," Drake said. "Fifth Fleet and CENTCOM are going to come down on them like Desert fucking Storm."
"Maybe. For right now, we need to plan for contingencies. We're less than fifty miles from the Iranian naval air base on Qeshm, and a hundred from Bandar Abbas. If we thought the straits were busy over the past couple of days, it's nothing compared to what it's going to be like now. The whole Iranian navy is going to be concentrated in this area — mostly supporting their invasion, but also looking for us."
"What are you proposing?"
"Every submariner's first line of defense, Commander. We go deep, and we hide."
Knowing that they could not hope to achieve a permanent conventional superiority over either the neighboring Gulf states or the hated American military presence in the area, the Tehran regime had for years focused heavily on nonconventional solutions to their problem — the disparity in reach and in destructive potential between Iran's military forces and those of the West. To that end, and for almost two decades now, they'd made their NBC warfare programs their top priority.
Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons were truly the great equalizers of modern warfare. Because of their sensitive nature politically, all nonconventional warfare efforts came under the direction of the IRGC — the Revolutionary Guard — and, therefore of the Council of Guardians and the Supreme Leader.
Despite appalling economic conditions, exacerbated by two and a half decades of trade sanctions imposed by the West, Iran had managed to stockpile several hundred tons of chemical weapons, including nerve, blister, choking, and blood agents. Weaponry included artillery rounds and bombs, as well as short- to medium-range missiles capable of striking targets across the Persian Gulf. Iran had signed and ratified the UN's Chemical Weapons Convention of 1992, a pact that obligated Tehran to destroy its chemical weapons stocks within ten years. Signatory to the treaty or not, Tehran was not about to surrender its strategic deterrent when its old enemy, Iraq, had chemical weapons, and in the 1980s had demonstrated their willingness to use them.
Iran also possessed biological weapons — in particular anthrax and botulin toxin. As with other nation-states that had pursued this research, they faced serious problems in disseminating biological agents. Their options, essentially, were through terrorist saboteurs, through sprays directed from ships or aircraft, or in missile warheads. The technical problems in delivering such warheads, however, were considerable, and no one — including the Iranian military — knew how successful such an attack would be. Despite this, some within the Iranian military felt bacteriological warfare was Iran's best hope if things came to war with the West, a cheap and effective means of potentially inflicting the same kind of casualties as a low-yield nuclear strike, and with no means of protecting against it.
The key ingredient in Iran's deterrent stockpile, of course, was her potential nuclear capability, and the promise of acquiring a workable nuclear device. Most observers believed that Iran was within two years of producing such a weapon, once she acquired the necessary fissionable material.
For some time now Iran had attempted to acquire that material, or the means of producing it. Tehran was also signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and had repeatedly pledged that its interest in developing nuclear power was solely to support its efforts to generate electricity for its population and civilian industry.
With its civilian nuclear power program still in a rudimentary state, however, Iran had repeatedly attempted to gain access to the technology that would enable them to build power plants, but which would also give them the ability to build nuclear weapons. During the past decade, Iran had diverted enriched uranium from a poorly guarded facility in Kazakhstan; research reactors from Argentina, India, China, and Russia; full-scale nuclear power plants from Russia and China; gas centrifuge equipment and technology from Germany and Switzerland; a gas centrifuge enrichment plant from Russia; uranium conversion plants from Russia and from China; and a laser enrichment plant from Russia.
All of these attempts were discovered by the West, and all were thwarted by a combination of U.S. diplomatic efforts and political pressure… all known attempts, at any rate. Covert efforts had continued worldwide, and most outside observers believed that Iran had managed to acquire at least small amounts of both plutonium and enriched uranium, enough to build a handful of devices, at least. As far back as 1999 an Iranian student in Sweden had been caught trying to smuggle thyratrons to Iran — complex bits of technology that could have applications to civilian research… but were also vital in the manufacture of nuclear triggers.
So far, Pakistan was the world's only nuclear Islamic state, and they were ostensibly, if not publicly, in America's pocket. Iran was determined, at any cost, to develop nuclear weapons technology, and they were very, very close.
They were so close, in fact, that they already had five warheads, though no one outside of a handful of military and government leaders and the technicians themselves knew about it. They'd not advertised the fact, nor had they exploded a device to demonstrate their capability, for several important reasons.
First, when the West became convinced that Iran possessed nukes, they would act. On that, Tehran had no doubt. And they might act before Iran had the chance to develop the other vital component of a nuclear weapon besides the warhead itself — a means to deliver it.
Iran possessed a number of potential delivery systems. The background of her missile force consisted of some three hundred Shahab-1 and one hundred Shahab-2 missiles purchased from North Korea; about two hundred CSS-8 missiles from China; and a precious handful of Shahab-3 systems, which had been manufactured in Iran. All of these save the last were short-range missiles similar to the infamous Iraqi Scuds. The Shahab-1 had a range of two hundred miles, the Shahab-2 of just over three hundred, just barely enough to reach across the Gulf at most points. The Chinese missiles had a range of less than a hundred miles, which made them useless for anything but attacks against Iraq or the very closest parts of Oman and the UAE; with a sufficiently powerful warhead, though, the CSS-8 could be used to close the Straits of Hormuz, or to destroy concentrations of U.S. warships off the Iranian coast. The Shahab-3 had a more respectable range of eight hundred miles, which put Israel, eastern Turkey, and most of Saudi Arabia within reach.
In 2004, Iran had successfully tested the Shahab-4, a home-grown intermediate-range ballistic missile with a declared range of 1,200 miles, far enough to strike Israel, most of Turkey, or any part of the Arabian peninsula, and with far greater accuracy than the Shahab-3. Reportedly, they were having technical difficulties with the Shahab-5, which was expected to be an intermediate-range missile capable of hitting targets over 6,200 miles distant; if launched from the northernmost portions of Iran, the Shahab-5 might just reach much of the U.S. eastern seaboard, possibly even Washington, D.C. At the very least, the Shahab-5 could strike any city in Europe… which might mean that the United States would stand alone in any future confrontation with Iran.