[QUOTE=Jurph]
One last thing: by working on indigenous SCUD and SCUD-derived missiles, they approach the long-term strategic goal of holding European and American cities at risk with IRBMs or ICBMs, while simultaneously improving the accuracy and reliability of their SRBMs. This means that they could build 1,000 missiles and plan to put (e.g.) five of them on a target, but with accuracy improvement retrofits, they could plan to allocate only two per target, increasing the number of targets they can hold at risk without building all-new missiles.
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Anything based on the SCUD, and especially a stretched or multi-stage design, is going to have some pretty significant problems. The SCUD is really little more than a V-2 with a slightly improved guidance set and higher performance fuel. There are some inherent flaws in the design (the use of eroding jet vanes, non-detaching RV, et cetera) which severely limit its accuracy even at nominal ranges, and as the Iraqis discovered with the SCUD-derived al-Hussein missile.
Personally, I’d be far more concerned about terrain-following long range cruise missiles, and especially those capable of sea launch. This was once the domain of superpowers, but with commerically available avionics, inertial laser gyro guidance, and GPS/GLONASS/COMPASS/Galileo system you can acheive far higher accuracy than an unguided ballistic RV. Iran has been working on cruise missiles based upon sea-skimming Russian and Chinese supercruise designs, and these are, in my opinion, a far greater threat than notoriously inaccurace SCUDS.
Stranger