A commercial port near Shanghai recently welcomed two Iranian vessels tasked with picking up over 1,000 tons of sodium perchlorate – a key precursor for the production of solid fuel ballistic missiles. While it seems clear that Iran will use this sodium perchlorate to build ballistic missiles, who these missiles are for is less obvious. After all, recent treaties between Iran and Russia have stressed the importance of military cooperation and geopolitical support, and medium-range systems like the Fateh-360 have already appeared in Russian hands.

However, while the fulfillment of this cooperation might be a long-term Iranian interest, its current conditions do not afford it this luxury. Instead, the shipment of Chinese sodium perchlorate indicates a rapid rebuilding of Iran’s missile industry since Israeli strikes in October, which have progressed to a point where the industry is ready for additional inputs of raw materials.

Sodium perchlorate (NaClO4) is a common chemical precursor to ammonium perchlorate (NH4ClO4), an oxidizer used in solid fuel rocket motors. Ammonium perchlorate mixtures are easy to manufacture, in common use around the world, and dependable. The Financial Times reported that “more than 1,000 tonnes” of sodium perchlorate is expected to be loaded on the two Iranian ships. However, the MV Jairan has been reported as preparing to load 22 containers, and the MV Golban 34 containers, well more than enough to load 1,000 tons of sodium perchlorate. The containers are standard 20-foot containers each with a capacity of 28,130 kg useful load and an internal useful volume of 33.1 cubic meters, suggesting a total available load of nearly 1,600 tons of product.

However, the actual capacity of the containers is limited by the dimensions of the pallets, since each container is packed by the pallet without additional space-filling packaging. Each pallet appears to contain either a single 1000 kg bag of sodium perchlorate or approximately 40 25 kg bags of sodium perchlorate; this may be for the purpose of standardizing shipments around a simple and common divisor, or may be a physical limitation of the pallet itself. Each shipping container can hold 2x5x2 pallets, resulting in each shipping container holding 20 tons of sodium perchlorate. In all, the 56 containers on the MV Jairan and MV Golbon are able to carry 1,120 tons of sodium perchlorate.

After conversion from sodium perchlorate to ammonium perchlorate, a relatively simple chemical process, this will yield 1,075.2 tons of ammonium perchlorate at perfect yield; at a more reasonable yield of 98 percent, 1,053.7 tons of ammonium perchlorate can be produced with this precursor. Iranian missile propellant generally contains around 70 percent ammonium perchlorate by weight, depending on the ammonium perchlorate mixture, and so this ammonium perchlorate can yield Iran’s military 1,505.3 tons of finished propellant.

Key Enablers

Both the MV Jairan and the MV Golbon took on their cargo in the Taicang Port area, located near Ningbo. The MV Jairan then docked at the Longshan Shipyard, while the MV Golbon departed the Changtu Island port on January 21.

While Taicang Port hosts a........

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