Ramin Parham

An Open Letter to @LockheedMartin To James D. Taiclet, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and to the Board of Directors. I have just returned from Lamerd, a city of thirty thousand in Iran's Fars province. On 28 February 2026, the opening day of the American and Israeli war on Iran, United States forces fired Precision Strike Missiles built by your corporation into its residential streets, its school and its sports hall. Twenty-one civilians were killed. More than one hundred and seventy were wounded — among them children who will live the rest of their lives without sight, without limbs, or without the use of their spines. The youngest of the dead was Avina Barzegar. She was two. Her photograph is taped above the fragment holes in her family's steel door. I have stood in front of it. Within a month, your corporation signed an agreement to quadruple production of the weapon that did this, reported at some $8.4 billion. I write because the legal consequences of having done so knowingly are more serious than your officers appear to have been advised. What occurred at Lamerd was a war crime. There was no military objective. Under the customary rule reflected in Article 52(2) of Additional Protocol, an object may be attacked only where it effectively contributes to military action and its destruction offers a definite military advantage. In six months, Central Command has identified no such object in Lamerd. It first claimed no American strike occurred within thirty miles of the city. When video made that untenable, it claimed the munition was an Iranian cruise missile, a claim rejected independently by Janes, McKenzie Intelligence, The New York Times and BBC Verify, each identifying the silhouette, the airburst and the fragmentation pattern of one weapon in that theatre. Yours. A denial is not a justification. Where an attacker answers civilian deaths by denying the attack rather than defending the target, it forecloses every defence the law makes available to it. The means were indiscriminate. The PrSM detonates fifteen to twenty metres above ground and disperses tens of thousands of tungsten fragments across a wide area. Investigators counted thousands of fragment impacts along a single 150-metre stretch of one residential street. The casualty pattern is not evidence of a strike gone wrong. It is evidence of the weapon working exactly as designed, in a place where its design guaranteed the result. And the strikes were successive. The first detonated above a sports hall where a girls' volleyball team was training. People ran into the open. The second fell on them. Then a third, then a fourth. Whatever might be argued about the first, nothing explains the rest except a decision taken with knowledge of what the first had just done. A city is not a proving ground. The PrSM had never been used in combat before that day. Lamerd was its debut, and Central Command's commander publicly praised that debut within days. It is sometimes assumed that validating a weapon under operational conditions is a military benefit that can be weighed in the balance. It cannot. The advantage the law requires must be "definite", "concrete and direct" — language chosen precisely to exclude benefits that are speculative, generalised or deferred. Performance data accrues to a production line, not to an attack. It belongs to no part of the balance a commander is permitted to strike. If the rationale was to observe the weapon's effects under live conditions, the civilians of Lamerd were not incidental to the object of the attack. They were the medium on which effectiveness was measured. The contract was made with knowledge. Complicity does not require sharing the perpetrator's purpose. It requires assistance having a substantial effect, furnished with knowledge. That is the standard on which the Hamburg court convicted the suppliers of Zyklon B in 1946; on which the Netherlands convicted Frans van Anraat for supplying chemical precursors to Iraq, holding expressly that the lawful commercial form of the transaction gave him no shelter; and which the French Cour de cassation confirmed reaches corporations in Lafarge. Your original contracts predate Lamerd. The expansion does not. By the time it was signed, the forensic record was public, the official account had collapsed twice, and CENTCOM had itself identified the operation as the weapon's combat debut. A prime contractor does not learn of its munition's first combat use from the newspapers. The expansion was not made in ignorance of how the weapon performed at Lamerd. It was made because of it. Your counsel will know that the corporation is not the principal exposure. Nuremberg did not try I.G. Farben or Krupp; it tried the men who ran them. Van Anraat went to prison as an individual. Officers who authorise continued manufacture and transfer after notice do so in their own names, in a world where Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Sweden and others exercise universal jurisdiction over grave breaches. That exposure does not lapse, and it travels. Accordingly: rescind the expansion agreement; suspend production and transfer pending an independent forensic investigation; preserve and disclose the performance data you hold on the Lamerd employment, because it is evidence; and cooperate with any prosecuting authority that opens a file. The answer that these are matters for the government and not the contractor was made at Nuremberg and failed there. A company that builds the weapon, receives the data on what it did to a city of thirty thousand, and then contracts to build four times as many is not a bystander to the decision. Do not repeat the claim that the matter is still under investigation. This is a government that tells its public it can read a name tag from orbit. It closed the Lamerd file in days, by denial, without answering a single question put to it. It has known since the morning of 28 February. It has decided the truth is inconvenient. Your corporation is now being asked whether it has decided the same. Avina Barzegar was two years old.