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The foreign policy world is buzzing over the question of whether or not Israel will attack Iran in the coming months. Assuming Israel does attack, the next question is how Iran would respond. American officials assessing the matter deemed it nearly certain that Iran would launch a conventional ballistic missile attack on Israel’s military installations, nuclear complex in Dimona, population centers like Tel Aviv and Haifa, or some combination of the above.

How concerned should Israel be about Iran’s ballistic missiles?

According to a report by former U.N. weapons inspector Michael Elleman, Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal is the “largest and most diverse” in the Middle East. While Israel is out of range of Iran’s short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs), Iran does possess at least two types of medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) that can theoretically reach every inch of Israel: the Ghadr-1, also known as Shahab-3 Variant, and the more advanced Sajjil series. There are also a number of missiles whose existence or operability is treated with some skepticism in the West. These include a purported shipment of North Korean BM-25 missiles in 2006 and the Iranian-made Fajr-3 and Shahab 4, 5, and 6 missiles.

Open-source assessments of Iran’s MRBM inventory are hard to come by and can be vague and contradictory. According to an April 2010 unclassified report from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), Iran has “approximately 1,000 missiles that range from 90-1,200 miles.” What proportion of those 1,000 missiles are MRBMs isn’t clear. A 2005 Congressional Research Service report offers a low-end estimate of Iran’s SRBMs at less than 500. Using the OSD report as a guide and doing a little arithmetic leaves one with the possibility of Iran having perhaps 500 MRBMs. Using the same method, this time with OSD’s high-range estimates of Iran’s SRBMs, puts Iran’s MRBM stock at fewer than 200.

While one shouldn’t overstate the precision of these open-source assessments, it nonetheless does appear that Iran possesses a significant arsenal of MRBMs. But quantity, of course, is different from quality, and the Iranians’ MRBMs don’t fare well in this regard, as they tend to be inaccurate and undependable. Here’s Michael Elleman again:

The successful destruction of a single fixed military target … would probably require Iran to use a significant percentage of its missile inventory … The missiles would probably be unable to shut down critical military activities.

This seems to be the stance Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak is taking. He reportedly played down the risks associated with an Iranian missile attack in a radio interview several weeks ago, maintaining that casualties from such an attack would be limited. This mirrors a statement he made last November in which he asserted that Israel would only incur “about 500 civilian casualties,” a judgment that no doubt factors in Israel’s Arrow missile defense system, currently in the process of being upgraded to intercept Shahab and Sajjil missiles. As a response to the public outcry after the 2006 Lebanon War, Israel also embarked on an expensive upgrade of its civil bomb shelters. Elleman agrees with Barak’s assessment:

Without a nuclear warhead … the casualties would probably be low – probably less than a few hundred, even if Iran unleashed its entire ballistic missile arsenal and a majority succeeded in penetrating missile defenses.

If this is the prevailing view among Israel’s leadership, then Iranian MRBMs alone will not serve as a sufficient Iranian deterrent to a preemptive Israeli strike.

Nathan Patin is an intern in the Foreign and Defense Policy department at AEI.