Word: scud
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...arms inspectors in their Toyota Land Cruisers paid a visit last week to a company called al-Nidaa in the Baghdad suburb of Zafaraniyah. This was the place where Iraq once manufactured its modified Scud missile, al-Hussein, one of the most potent tools in its arsenal. The weapon has been forbidden to Baghdad since the 1991 Gulf War cease-fire, and the Iraqis claim these days that al-Nidaa makes only metal molds and tools. But the inspectors, armed with 1,240 unrevealing pages on missile programs that were part of Baghdad's recent accounting to the U.N., made...
Thus Pentagon officials, who have little confidence that U.N. inspectors will unearth any illicit Iraqi missiles, have poured energy into devising ways to neutralize the Scud threat. Their plans involve putting Scud-hunting commandos on the ground fast, deploying improved technologies for detecting and destroying Scud launchers and missiles--even after they are shot--and shortening the chain of command for anti-Scud operations. Still, a recent independent review concluded that these efforts would probably fall short, which suggests that Iraq's Scuds could again be a complicating factor...
...last time around, the U.S. military's inability to defeat the Scuds turned out to be its biggest failure in the war. In 1991 the U.S. dedicated 2,493 missions to what came to be called the "Great Scud Hunt." But it did not score one confirmable kill against a mobile missile or its launcher in Iraq--though it did destroy what turned out to be a few fuel trucks as well as some East German decoys that looked like the real thing. Scuds caused not only mayhem in Israel during the month the missiles rained down on Tel Aviv...
...regime is just as menacing. At least Saddam Hussein claims to harbor no biological, chemical or nuclear arms. Kim freely admits to developing nuclear weapons in violation of international accords. And last week, in an apparent reaction to the high-seas interdiction of a shipment of North Korean-built Scud missiles bound for Yemen, the North announced it would restart a mothballed nuclear reactor that could produce enough weapons-grade plutonium for at least one atomic bomb a year...
...Yemen claims the missiles, shipped along with high-explosive conventional warheads, had been ordered some time ago for its army, which has a small preexisting stock of SCUDS. Some of the weapons had previously been used in Yemen's civil war in 1994. The Soviet-designed SCUD-B with a range of some 200 miles is a common item in the arsenals of the Middle East. They're a 1950s-vintage technology no longer in production in Russia, although North Korea and other countries have continued to manufacture and improve the system. SCUD-Bs of the type suspected of being...