Konstantin Sivkov, the first vice president of the Academy for Geopolitical Sciences, believes that Iran is capable of establishing its own production of state-of-the-art missile systems.
"Their technical performance will be much worse than that of Russian systems, of course. Here is an example. The USA used to ship F-14 Tomcat fighters to Iran. The jets were equipped with air-to-air Phoenix missiles. It was the only country in the world that earned such an honor from the USA. As soon as the shah regime in Iran collapsed and ayatollahs came to power there, the military cooperation between the two countries was suspended. The US realized that its potential enemy possessed the arms that can drastically change the situation in a possible conflict. As a result, the USA did it best to deprive Iran of Tomcat spare parts and other equipment in a hope that the delivered planes and missiles would come out of order one day and Iran would not be able to establish their production afterwards. However, Iran launched its own production of both the spare parts and armament systems for F-14 planes, including Phoenix missiles.
"It brings up an idea that the Islamic Republic will be able to build a complex similar to S-300. They can do it with China's help. China purchased Russian export variants of S-300 and then started making its own versions of the system. However, as experience shows, everything that China copied from Russia was much worse than the originals.
"Let's take one of the most important parameters of the S-300 system - its interference resistance. This problem cannot be solved with mere copying. The data used in the design of S-300 interference resistance capability is a highly important state secret, which no one intends to make public.
"Nevertheless, even if Iran's systems are 20 or 40 percent worse than the Russian ones, they can become a serious obstacle for conducting air raids against the Islamic Republic. Neither the USA, nor Israel will attack the country if they are not certain that everything will happen strictly according to their plans. The Iranian administration can see that American threats to North Korea have been replaced with persuasion and diplomatic approach after North Korea has proved the possession of nuclear arms."