On November 12, 2011, a tremendous explosion destroyed a secret missile base close to Tehran, killing seventeen Revolutionary Guards and reducing dozens of missiles to a heap of charred iron. General Hassan Teh- rani Moghaddam, the "father" of the Shehab long-range missiles, and the man in charge of Iran's missile program, was killed in the explosion. But the secret target of the bombing was not Moghaddam. It was a solid-fuel rocket engine, able to carry a nuclear missile more than six thousand miles across the globe, from Iran's underground silos to the U.S. mainland.
