No matter what off-the-cuff comments President Donald Trump makes on the campaign trail, Iran cannot nuke Los Angeles or San Diego.
Iran has no known nuclear weapons and no known missiles capable of reaching California cities. Tehran is about 7,500 miles from California, well beyond the roughly 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 was difficult to judge how Iran’s missile program would recover after being disrupted by U.S. strikes. Experts have not yet inspected the bombed sites, but the uranium needed for the program may still be buried deep in the rubble.
“Iran remains a proliferation risk, but its nuclear program is not an imminent threat,” Kelsey Davenport, the organization’s director of nonproliferation policy, told Business Insider.
Trump raised the possibility of an Iranian attack on California in impromptu remarks at a Republican rally in Nebraska on Monday, arguing that a war with Iran was “a small price to pay to keep the world safe, to keep our country safe.”
“They can destroy a city. Let them destroy Los Angeles. Let them destroy San Diego,” Trump said.
Iran possesses long-range conventional missiles and drones capable of striking U.S. troops and infrastructure across the Middle East. In an epic fury, an Iranian attack in Kuwait in March killed six soldiers and other attacks severely damaged U.S. military installations across the Middle East.
But these systems can only carry out area strikes, not nuclear weapons.
The United States has struck twice at Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities since May last year, including at the start of Operation Epic Fury. Prior to these attacks, Iran was close to the capability to produce a nuclear weapon but had not yet produced one. Davenport said that while the amount of uranium remaining is unknown, military strikes alone cannot eliminate Iran’s nuclear knowledge.
“No matter how the war ends, Iran will have the ability to build a bomb,” she said.
Davenport said that if Iran or any other adversary ended up acquiring nuclear weapons and missiles capable of delivering them across oceans, the places most likely to be at risk would likely be major cities and sensitive military locations, although such an escalation would be unprecedented for any country and unlikely to occur.
She pointed out the inherent dangers of escalation, also known as “mutually assured destruction.” The use of nuclear weapons could lead to nuclear retaliation, which is the main reason why these weapons have not been used since World War II. “This is an escalating spiral that states are not going to climb in a hurry,” Davenport said.
Moreover, some countries still frequently carry out major conventional attacks without crossing the nuclear threshold. Israel, the United States and Russia are all nuclear-armed states that attack their opponents without using nuclear weapons.
For more than a decade, Iran has also relied on asymmetric tools to counter the United States and its partners, including cyberattacks. Hackers linked to the Iranian government have targeted U.S. banks, universities, businesses and government agencies. A group linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps previously claimed responsibility for a hacking system that took control of U.S. water treatment facilities.