Strategic Weapons: November 16, 2001

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Israel's Arrow-2 anti-missile may be delayed due to problems in staging a realistic test. Israel wants to test the Arrow-2 against the Scud-C, which has a range of 600 kilometers. (There is a direct relation between the range of a missile and its speed on approaching a target; missiles launched from farther away are, thus, harder to stop as there is less detection time and less engagement time.) The problem is that the US doesn't have any Scud-Cs to use for the test, and even if it did, the White Sands test range is too small to accommodate a weapon of this range. There is great concern that launching a liquid-fueled missile poses considerable danger to anyone around the launch site.--Stephen V Cole