Word: warheads
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...newest missile, the intermediate range Shahab 3, which can reach Israel, Turkey and U.S. military deployments in the region. "Our hands are always on the trigger and our missiles are ready for launch," Salami told the official IRNA news agency Wednesday. While it can carry a one-ton conventional warhead, the Shahab 3 is not very accurate, U.S. officials say. Marrying a nuclear warhead to it - assuming Iran is able to build one - is also a daunting technical challenge...
...Pentagon officials have wooed the Russians with enticements to get them to participate in the shield, saying that Tehran threatens Moscow as well as other Eurasian nations. Iran's newest missile, the intermediate range Shahab 3, can reach European capitals, although marrying it to a nuclear warhead remains a daunting technical challenge, U.S. officials say. Moscow has steadfastly declined to cooperate, saying the shield actually is a ploy to blunt Russia's own missile force. "This system is not designed to counter a Russian threat - this system is designed to counter what is an emerging threat from the Middle East...
...growing consensus among national-security professionals is that a deadly weapon targeting the U.S. is far more likely to be delivered hidden in a shipping container than in the warhead of an intercontinental ballistic missile. But the $10 billion a year the Pentagon devotes to missile defenses is almost twice the amount the U.S. spends on defending the nation's borders and ports from smuggled weapons...
...reform committee's national-security panel, emphasized the epic technological challenge involved in building a nuclear-tipped, ocean-spanning missile. In the past half-century, only five nations - the U.S., Britain, China, France and Russia - have managed to successfully develop, and then integrate, the requisite propulsion, guidance, reentry and warhead systems. "The long history of ICBMs demonstrates that such success took considerable resources in time, funding, knowledge, infrastructure, organization and national commitment," Hildreth said. "It's this aspect of it that, I think, is lacking in so many of the discussions about ICBM threats to the country today...
...both civilian and military nuclear programs, mined uranium is converted into a gas and then enriched in centrifuges to increase the proportion of U-235--the uranium atoms that start and continue a nuclear chain reaction. Uranium that feeds a power plant needs only 3% enrichment, but a nuclear warhead requires at least 90% enrichment, and more centrifuges. The difference is so significant that international inspectors would probably detect the enrichment change unless Iran chose to enrich its uranium covertly, slowing the process. A country with civilian nuclear plants could choose to reprocess spent atomic fuel into plutonium, which...