Our Publications
Articles and Reports
May 29, 2026
An email solicitation accidentally sent to Iran Watch provides evidence indicating that a China-based family of companies is attempting to sell Shahed-136 drone engines to Iranian customers.
Articles and Reports
March 31, 2026
The United States and Israel have been at war with Iran for one month. What is the status of Iran’s weapon programs? This article provides a brief overview of what is known from open sources about the current state of Iran's missile, drone, and nuclear programs.
Articles and Reports
December 17, 2025
Shahed drones have been the iconic symbol of arms proliferation in recent years. This report traces the history of Iran’s and, subsequently, Russia’s efforts to procure and mass-produce the German-designed engines that power Shahed suicide drones and the role played by Chinese investors in making those engines available to them.
Articles and Reports
August 26, 2025
How quickly might Iran enrich enough uranium for a small nuclear arsenal in the aftermath of the Israeli and U.S. strikes? This analysis considers scenarios involving various sizes of secret sites and differing levels of usable enriched uranium stockpiles.
Articles and Reports
June 24, 2025
On June 21, the United States struck three nuclear sites in Iran in an operation designed to “severely degrade Iran’s nuclear weapons infrastructure,” according to General Dan Cain, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is still too early to know how much damage was actually inflicted.
Articles and Reports
June 11, 2025
How quickly could Iran get enough fissile material for a small nuclear arsenal? This timetable estimates how quickly Iran could amass enough weapons-grade uranium for at least five bombs. Once it has the enriched uranium, however, it could take at least several months to turn it into a working weapon.
Articles and Reports
February 27, 2025
Two weeks after assuming office, President Donald Trump resumed the maximum pressure policy against Iran that his first administration pursued from 2018 to 2021. In 2025, Iran is much closer to producing a nuclear weapon, but it is vulnerable to pressure in the crucial areas of missile and drone proliferation.
Articles and Reports
November 8, 2024
The Alabuga Special Economic Zone (SEZ), an entity overseeing an industrial campus in Russia’s Tatarstan region, operates a drone plant under contract with the Russian military to manufacture Iranian-designed Shahed-136 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for use in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Articles and Reports
October 3, 2024
On October 1, Iran carried out a second large-scale missile attack against Israel. Although the operation differed in meaningful ways from Iran’s first missile attack on Israel in April, the result was largely the same, further underscoring some key limitations for the country's conventional missile program.
Articles and Reports
August 23, 2024
The Chabahar spaceport will enable Iran to take the next steps toward its space ambitions. And although the West has long been concerned by Iran’s development of rockets for space launches, the satellites those rockets carry may eventually prove equally valuable as military assets.