...The X-55 has a ranged of 3,000 km and is capable of carrying 200 kiloton nuclear warheads. It puts Japan, all of Russia and Israel within range. Piksun's admission is the first official confirmation of the Ukrainian missile sale that was first made public last month by a Ukrainian parliament member.
Their acquisition heightens concerns about Iran's nuclear weapons program. The US embassy in Kiev is "closely monitoring" the investigation and demands the findings be made public in full. The Japanese embassy echoed the demand.
DEBKAfile's Moscow sources reveal that the Ukrainian shipment to Iran included radioactive materials for making "dirty bombs."
According to DEBKAfile's military sources, the 12 strategic cruise missiles place the strategic ratio between the Islamic Republic and Israel on a completely new level. Iran shares this asset with only two other world powers, the United States and Russia. This weapon is used for destroying known relatively fixed-position targets, such as Israel's Dimona nuclear center and population centers. Its guidance system combines inertial-Doppler navigation and position correction based on in-flight comparison of terrain in targeted regions with images stored in the memory of its on-board computer. The propulsion system is a dual-flow engine located underneath the missile's tail.
Possession of the Kh-55 makes Iran's Shahab-3 or its projected Shahab-4 missile programs irrelevant. Tehran may have given them exposure as a red herring to distract attention from its high-profile missile asset...
Worst case: Israel now considers itself under imminent threat of nuclear attack from Iran. Unless the US can guarantee that no missiles will enter Israeli airspace, then any Iranian alert-launch may trigger nuclear retaliation. Note: It has been suggested that these missiles are only fully-functional training missiles, but that does no explicitly say that they cannot be converted to weapon carrying systems. |