Worrisome

Iran has reported that it launched a satellite into Earth orbit over the weekend.

What's worrisome is that if you can put a satellite into orbit, you can put a missile into a city.

Even if you don't have a nuclear payload, just having the ability to put a high explosive warhead into a major American or European city would be enough to create panic.

Here's a situation you should consider:

Assume that the guidance package on an Iranian ICBM would be about as good as a Soviet missile in the 1970's or 1980's. So it wouldn't be able to target a particular building, or even a particular city block, but might have a circular area of error of between 1 and 2 kilometers.

Now let's assume that you fire, oh, 25 or so of these things at Manhattan, London, Berlin, or Hong Kong.

Yes, you're not going to hit anything important on purpose, but if you sprinkle high explosive bombs over a city like that, things are going to get pretty scary for those on the receiving end, even if their individual chances of being hurt are pretty minimal.

And it's not too difficult to take a few years and improve both your payload and guidance enough that you have a really workable nuclear deterrent.

Let's see how the new administration reacts when they wake up to realize that Iran not only hates our guts, but they have the tools to start World War III, and they don't care if they all die in ball of fire. To them it would be a blaze of glory.