Iranian missle hysteria
Maniak on the House Intel report on Iran:
I dug through that Atrios link and that House Staff Report is astounding. I'm hoping the intelligence community is slapping their heads at that one as much as I am. I'll stick to rockets maybe instead of politics. Probes to Pluto and missiles are more my speed. I'll leave the conventional forces and Iranian intentions out of this one.
The report seems to be intentionally lumping every missile together as just "missiles". Hezbollah has "10,000 missiles", and then the Shahab 4 has a 4,000 km range. But almost all of Hezbollah's missiles are Katyushas, which are a battlefield artillery rocket and an entirely different beast from ballistic missiles. Israel and international forces in Lebanon need to worry about the Katyushas. They're irrelevant to the rest of the world.
The cornerstone of the document is a big world map with Iranian missile circles on it. The kicker is that the circles seem to be centered on northern Kuwait, or maybe Umm Qasr, Iraq. Most generously, it's a corner of Iran just along the border with Iraq. Iran probably has short range missiles in this area continually since their war with Iraq. That's not surprising.
But there's also no evidence that the Shahab 4 is more than a blueprint drawing at this point. It was originally being developed as a satellite launcher, but that was apparently abandoned in favor of an alternate plan based on improving the Shahab 3 using lessons from China's Long March 3 program. I'd also note that there is some amount of commonality of design between the Shahab 4 and the Taepodong 2, which makes a crash program to develop the Shahab 4 unlikely right now. Iran probably switched to the Chinese-style approach for a good reason. None of the Shahab 4s have ever been built or tested, and the R&D resources seem to have been directed towards the Shahab 3 program for the past 3 years.
If a prototype Shahab 4 was sitting somewhere waiting for a test flight it would probably be on the other side of the country near the launch facilities at Emamshahr near the Caspian Sea, so that outermost launch circle is doubly fantasy. Russia doesn't seem to be in a panic over this hypothetical undeveloped missile, and they're the ones who would be most threatened by it if it existed.
I dug through that Atrios link and that House Staff Report is astounding. I'm hoping the intelligence community is slapping their heads at that one as much as I am. I'll stick to rockets maybe instead of politics. Probes to Pluto and missiles are more my speed. I'll leave the conventional forces and Iranian intentions out of this one.
The report seems to be intentionally lumping every missile together as just "missiles". Hezbollah has "10,000 missiles", and then the Shahab 4 has a 4,000 km range. But almost all of Hezbollah's missiles are Katyushas, which are a battlefield artillery rocket and an entirely different beast from ballistic missiles. Israel and international forces in Lebanon need to worry about the Katyushas. They're irrelevant to the rest of the world.
The cornerstone of the document is a big world map with Iranian missile circles on it. The kicker is that the circles seem to be centered on northern Kuwait, or maybe Umm Qasr, Iraq. Most generously, it's a corner of Iran just along the border with Iraq. Iran probably has short range missiles in this area continually since their war with Iraq. That's not surprising.
But there's also no evidence that the Shahab 4 is more than a blueprint drawing at this point. It was originally being developed as a satellite launcher, but that was apparently abandoned in favor of an alternate plan based on improving the Shahab 3 using lessons from China's Long March 3 program. I'd also note that there is some amount of commonality of design between the Shahab 4 and the Taepodong 2, which makes a crash program to develop the Shahab 4 unlikely right now. Iran probably switched to the Chinese-style approach for a good reason. None of the Shahab 4s have ever been built or tested, and the R&D resources seem to have been directed towards the Shahab 3 program for the past 3 years.
If a prototype Shahab 4 was sitting somewhere waiting for a test flight it would probably be on the other side of the country near the launch facilities at Emamshahr near the Caspian Sea, so that outermost launch circle is doubly fantasy. Russia doesn't seem to be in a panic over this hypothetical undeveloped missile, and they're the ones who would be most threatened by it if it existed.
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