Last week, Iran announced it had designed a "quantum processor."
This is Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, the Coordinating Deputy of the Islamic Republic’s Army, holding a so-called ‘quantum processor’ that he claimed Iran developed, showing it off during a ceremony at the mam Khomeini Maritime University in Noshahr.
Only one problem. You can buy that same board on Amazon for $589.
Iran International, which covered this story, reminds us that Iran claimed in 2020 to have developed a "breakthrough" super-device that could detect people infected with coronavirus from a football field away. IRGC Commander-in-chief Hossein Salami unveiled the device and claimed Iran would mass produce it.
Previously, Iran also announced they built a stealth fighter jet, which couldn't possibly fly. And also a home-built fighter aircraft that was a 1970s-era US-made F-5F Tiger with paint.
But what about Iran's other announcement this week?
It claimed that the missile, the Fattah, could travel at Mach 15 and could maneuver to avoid anti-missile defenses.
Is this legit?
Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard’s aerospace program, said that they had performed a ground test of the engine. Which means they didn't actually test the missile: it has not flown a meter and no one knows if it could really maneuver itself or fly as fsst as they claim if it gets built.
No country has publicly revealed a missile that surpasses Mach-8, so Mach-15 - over 11,000 miles per hour - sounds like a fantasy. (Such a missile would reach Israel from Iran in about three minutes.)
In May, Russian Kinzhal missiles, which was also claimed to be hypersonic and impossible to defend against, were downed by US-made Patriot anti-missile systems in Ukraine.
But at least one Israeli expert says that the missile looks like it could be built, although he doesn't agree that it cannot be defended against.
Tal Inbar, a senior research fellow at the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, a nonprofit organization that promotes public support for missile defense systems, told JNS on Wednesday that the claims being made by Iran about the missile’s features, range and precision appear to be true.The missile, he said, is a “new product, that has no equivalent in the world. It can open, for Iran, a new operational door.”
I'm not quite as convinced; this would be significantly better than anything developed by any major power. Iran has some very talented engineers, and the missiles they do have are a real danger to the world. They have learned North Korean missile technology. But I'm skeptical that their engineers are the best in the world.
Either way, the other stories like the ones about the processor and Covid detector and stealth aircraft prove that you cannot trust a word that Iran says.
One open question is how exactly these obvious deceptions occur. The leaders making the announcements are typically not engineers and they are parroting what they are told by the engineers who report to them. I cannot believe that they are in on the deception, which means that their underlings are terrified to tell them the truth that the pet project that they promised is impossible, and they built these fake devices for them to embarrass themselves with in front of the world.
If the chain of command in Iran is so dysfunctional, that might be very good news for any future conflict.
