wikipedia article talks about on the order of 300 Scud missiles launched during Iran-Iraq war resulting in several thousand civilian casualties. With civilians being, of course, citizens of the two middle eastern nations particularly notable for caring about civilian casualties…
So how rational was that? Is a single Scud missile cheap enough to spend it in order to kill around 10 people? Why didn’t they invest the resources into more artillery for the battlefield or maybe use the same Scuds for attacks on valuable military targets?
They are terror devices. The goal is to spread irrational fear in the population, which in turn (supposedly) weakens the support of the regime and stuff like that. It’s a psychological effect completely out of proportion to their real effect.
With modern mass media and politicians that encourage fear, terrorism is incredibly cost effective.
The scud is an old area effect weapon, meant to be used in multiple launches. It simply did not have the accuracy of a modern rocket, at least those generation scuds. The soviets would have loaded them up with poison gas, high explosive, and probably confetti and launch them en mass westwards.
Basically it had the CEP the size of Manhattan, the combatants could have killed a few chickens or killed a few thousand depending on where the scud touched down, more of a russian roulette terror weapon.
you seem to be going off-topic into modern Western politics. Where is the evidence of Iranian or Iraqi governments at the time “encouraging fear” or even having any mass media in the first place? Where is the evidence of those fairly light casualties from missile attacks causing a decline in support for either nation’s regime, if they even cared about such support in the first place?