A quick thread on the Tondar 69, a missile that is often forgotten but played an important role in Iranian missile development.

Like so much of Iran's missile program, the history of the Tondar 69 goes back to the Iran-Iraq war when the Iranians were seeking ballistic missiles from a variety of sources. Among them were the Soviet Union and Syria, both of which rebuffed their requests for Scuds.

Libya and the DPRK proved more cooperative but there was also a third country willing to sell ballistic missiles to Tehran – China. For reasons of secrecy, negotiations with the Chinese were held in Thailand and on the Iranian side they included both Moghaddam and Vahid Dastjerdi

At first, the Iranians wanted a missile with a range of 300km but were surprised to learn that despite having ICBMs, the Chinese had no such system. Chinese officials told them to look at a map of China to see why. They simply had no need for such ranges.

However, there was one missile they could offer: the B610 (CSS-8), a ground-to ground version of the HQ-2 surface-to-air-missile which itself was a Chinese copy of the Soviet SA-2. Originally, the missile had a range of merely 125km.