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Home » Missiles » Iran’s Super Missile Will Defeat Great Satan, Steal Your Girlfriend

Iran’s Super Missile Will Defeat Great Satan, Steal Your Girlfriend

There was an AP story the other day that par­roted some hilar­i­ous Iranian claims about the capa­bil­ity of their missiles :

Iran-Missile-Fajr-3-1avril2006-1-2.jpg

Stressing Iran’s pre­pared­ness, state tele­vi­sion said the Revolutionary Guards planned to begin three days of test­ing the short-​​range Zalzal and Fajr-​​5 mis­siles Sunday. It could not be con­firmed if the exer­cise had begun near Garmsar city, about 60 miles south­east of Tehran.

“The maneu­ver is aimed at eval­u­at­ing defen­sive and fight­ing capa­bil­i­ties of the mis­siles,” the report quoted an uniden­ti­fied Guards com­man­der as saying.

Last year, Iran held three large-​​scale mil­i­tary exer­cises to test what it called an “ultra-​​horizon” mis­sile and the Fajr-​​3, a rocket that it claims can evade radar and use mul­ti­ple war­heads to hit sev­eral tar­gets simul­ta­ne­ously. (empha­sis mine)

When I first read this, I prac­ti­cally fell out of my chair laugh­ing. For those unac­quainted with the Fajr-​​3, it is spin-​​stabilized artillery rocket based with a range of about 50 miles. It is typ­i­cally fired out of tubes mounted on the back of a truck, sim­i­lar to the clas­sic Katyusha. Iranian gen­er­als have tried to pass off the Fajr fam­ily of rock­ets off as some sort of medium range bal­lis­tic mir­a­cle before, which I imag­ine was greeted with a healthy amount of skepticism.

The only way an unguided rocket like the Fajr could avoid radar is if it was fired in a really low arc. The effi­cacy of this option is very lim­ited, how­ever, because it dras­ti­cally reduces the rocket’s range. The MIRV is just silly. The only way that rocket is going to strike a tar­get in mul­ti­ple times is if it breaks up in mid-​​air.

By the way, the Fajr also pro­vides a excel­lent case of why Wikipedia isn’t always the great­est source of infor­ma­tion. Some poor sap named ArmanJan cre­ated a pro­file for a Fajr-​​3 bal­lis­tic mis­sile based on the erro­neous San Diego Trib arti­cle I linked to. Check out the dis­cus­sion page for lots of great back and forth between him and the heroes that defend Wikipedia’s verac­ity on a daily basis.

If that wasn’t enough to crack a smile on your face, just look at how incon­sis­tent the AP story is with a CBS​.com story on the same subject:

The Iranian mil­i­tary on Monday began five days of maneu­vers near the north­ern city of Garmsar, about 62 miles south­east of Tehran, state tele­vi­sion reported. The mil­i­tary tested its Zalzal-​​1 and Fajr-​​5 mis­siles, the TV reported.

The Zalzal-​​1, able to carry a 1,200-pound pay­load, has a range of 200 miles, mak­ing it able to hit any­where in Iraq or U.S. bases in the Gulf as well as into east­ern Saudi Arabia. The Fajr-​​5, with a 1,800-pound pay­load, has a range of 35 miles.

Neither could reach Israel, but Iran is known to have mis­siles that can. It is not known if either mis­sile tested Monday is capa­ble of car­ry­ing a nuclear warhead. (again, empha­sis added) 

To quote Donald Rumsfeld, “Oh my good­ness gra­cious.” 1,800 pound pay­load? I think I will go with Globalsecurity​.org and the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s more con­ser­v­a­tive pay­load esti­mate of 90 kilo­grams (about 200 pounds).

As for the nuclear ques­tion, I think that even 1,200 pounds is a bit light for basic gun-​​type pay­load. We man­aged to get our kilo­ton W9 and W19 nuclear artillery shells down to 850 and 600 pounds, respec­tively, but I don’t know if the Iranians are any­where near that level of tech­ni­cal prowess yet.

- Crossposted from Robot Economist’s blog The Arms Control Otaku

UPDATE 11:33 AM: Now the Mullahs are claim­ing they’ve got a hand-​​launched UAV, too.

Researchers in this com­pany have for the first time designed and built four-​​kilo (nine-​​pound) hand-​​launched air­craft, Rasool Peyghambari, direc­tor of aero­nau­tics com­pany Asr-​​e Talai Factories told the ISNA news agency.

These air­craft are unique in the coun­try and they are as good as the best and most effi­cient ones inter­na­tion­ally, he said, adding we pre­fer to dis­play its capa­bil­i­ties after oper­a­tional tests.

This isn’t really my areas of exper­tise. But Armscontrol​.ru has a extended arti­cle on Iranian drones, with pic­tures and data. Needless to say, I don’t think they can com­pete with our snappy F-​​22 Raptor RC plane, let alone the RQ-​​11 Raven UAV.

UPDATE 11:433 AM:Check out Jane Vaynman’s take on the trou­ble brew­ing for Iran’s psy­cho president.

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January 24th, 2007 | Missiles | 34168 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2007/01/24/irans-super-missile-will-defeat-great-satan-steal-your-girlfriend/Iran%27s+Super+Missile+Will+Defeat+Great+Satan%2C+Steal+Your+Girlfriend2007-01-24+16%3A25%3A12hampton You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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  1. pjk says:
    January 24, 2007 at 1:44 pm

    I almost fell out of my chair laugh­ing at that head­line. Actually not really, but I laughed really hard. Well done.

    Reply
  2. Macaca says:
    January 24, 2007 at 3:51 pm

    The title made me smile too, niceone :)
    On a side note: I find the ‘typ­i­cal Arabic’ rethorics some­what amus­ing. It’s all­ways so much bet­ter and nicer then the real thing they’re talk­ing about, with such obvi­ous exager­a­tions that im all­ways won­der­ing if they’d believe it them­selves (all­most like stand up com­edy).
    The way Iran talks about their mis­siles and weaponary is so alike my friendly neigh­bour­hood halal guy and his brother the elec­tor­nics sales­man. “Oh sir, it can do 500 watts no prob­lem! Special!”

    Reply
  3. Haninah says:
    January 25, 2007 at 10:08 am

    @jrp:
    Don’t you mean RSLV? After all, single-​​use space launch vehi­cles are the type of prim­i­tive tech­nol­ogy the infi­dels are still fid­dling with… clearly, if it’s man­u­fac­tured by the Islamic Republic (using entirely indige­nous designs and processes, of course) it must be the next gen­er­a­tion system!

    Reply
  4. Joe says:
    December 5, 2007 at 12:06 pm

    Americans like your­self almost fell out of their chair too when they were told in 1960 that the Vietnamese would ‘ass-​​whip’ them, they didn’t lis­ten and the rest was his­tory.
    The Israeli’s prac­ti­cally fell out of their chair when Hezbollah said it could and would defend itself and, well to be hon­est they were KICKED out of their chairs by Hezbollah.
    You really don’t want to be make­ing the same mis­take again now do we. I mean sole ‘super­power’ can’t even score a vic­tory in Afghanistan nev­er­mind think­ing about Iran.
    A clas­sic case of dumb and dumber!

    Reply
  5. The Light of the World says:
    January 13, 2009 at 8:29 am

    And God cre­ated Man in his own image and com­manded his Angles to bow before him…
    … But him the most wicked that old ser­pent that is satan refused.
    And he will do any­thing to make you bow before him.
    So be care­ful ye mus­lim, for any­body who bows down before any­body other than man is bow­ing before Satan!

    Reply
  6. m.a.valizadeh says:
    January 25, 2009 at 10:18 am

    i want a girl­friend to 17 age

    Reply

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