Iranian state television showed footage of nine long and medium range missiles being launched on Wednesday. The missiles were fired during war games and officials say they are a response to recent threats of attack by the US and Israel. State media reported that the missiles included a new version of the Shahab-3 missile, with a range of 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometres). In a report in 2005 David Isenberg, senior analyst with the Washington-based British American Security Information Council and an adjunct scholar at the Cato institute stated that the Shahab 3: “ is a scaled-up version of the Russian Scud B and Scud C missiles, … the accuracy… at its range of (800 miles) 1,300 km has been estimated at no better than (two miles) three kilometers of its target.” The drill came less than a day after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he saw no possibility of a war with the United States or Israel. In June Israel’s military sent warplanes over the eastern Mediterranean for a large military exercise that U.S. officials described as a possible rehearsal for a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
