Iran's Defense Ministry is constructing the most advanced domestic multiple-purpose battleship, the acting commander of Iran's Navy says.
Rear Admiral Gholam-Reza Bigham told Fars News Agency on Thursday that the battleship would shore up the country's "deterrence capabilities."
The high tonnage of this battleship, the commander said would enable it to carry out missions in far-off waters.
According to Bigham, the battleship, which is to be domestically constructed, would be among the world's most sophisticated warships.
The commander added that Iran's naval forces were fully prepared to defend the country's territorial waters as well as to cooperate with neighboring countries in establishing regional security.
In line with its defensive doctrine, Iran has been equipping its navy with high-tech and high-speed missile boats, frigates, vessels, and submarines.
#6
It's the 18" main battery and the 20" turret face armor that'll really set it off. Just don't skimp on the light AA. Those 25mm Hotchkiss triple mounts don't live up to the hype.
Posted by: Mike ||
11/07/2009 8:39 Comments ||
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#8
The soon to be heard quote, "They sunk my battleship!"
Sorry, had to say it.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
11/07/2009 9:05 Comments ||
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#9
49Pan, Nah, we won't sink their battleship, the Iranians are smarter than that.................they'll build it underwater to start with and skip the middle steps.
#19
I see what you did there Oldspook. Some vigorous yard work is good for clearing the head.
Posted by: ed ||
11/07/2009 19:11 Comments ||
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#20
Crazyfool, I hope they are building a Yamato Battleship. This way, we can see just how much faster we can sink it! I have $50 on 20 seconds, we hit the ammo cache.
Posted by: Charles ||
11/07/2009 19:15 Comments ||
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#21
Regarding the ship name...
I do know a bit of Farsi, learned it on the job a long time ago. Just key words.
#22
By the way, where did you get the translation? I got my from my English-Farsi dictionary.
"Objective" is the main connotation, but its also used in the military sense of the word as in artillery calls, like "SHELL" then "SPLASH" by the battery followed by "TARGET" response to impact by the FO (then Fire For Effect or else adjuustments).
That's the only context I know, and Farsi does have a different words for other meanings of target in my dictionary.
I am unsure if it applies to ships or aircraft that are being tracked, so big grain of salt.
#24
Any single ship, no matter how powerful, well-armed or armored, is vulnerable when alone. If they said they were building a complete battle group, it might be a problem.
Otherwise, its name, Target, is very appropriate.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
11/07/2009 21:44 Comments ||
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#25
At the rate the future is becoming history these days, if it is not complete and christened within a few months it won't belong to the ruling mullahs of Iran when it's done.
The IDF issued Thursday what it said were damning photos showing Katyusha rockets discovered last week by UNIFIL troops in Lebanon that are of the same make as the rockets seized by the Navy when it boarded the Francop cargo ship Wednesday.
On Thursday, the IDF finished removing the weaponry from the containers and transferred it from Ashdod to a base in the center in the country where it will be inspected and reviewed by munitions experts.
The final weight of the cache was 320 tons and included 9,000 mortar shells, thousands of 107-mm. Katyusha rockets that have a range of 15 kilometers, some 600 Russian-made 122-mm. rockets with a 40-km. range and hundreds of thousands of Kalashnikov bullets.
IDF sources said they were surprised by the significant quantity of mortar shells. "This is the most we have seen in a single shipment," one senior officer involved in reviewing the arms cache said Thursday.
Other officials said it was possible that Hizbullah was lacking mortar shells or was planning on using them more prominently in the event of a future conflict with the IDF.
Most of the weaponry, the senior officer said, appeared to have come from the Far East and Russia, while some of it was made in Iran. Most of it appeared to have been manufactured in the past few years, the officer said.
In one of the photos released by the IDF, several 107-mm. Katyusha rockets are seen on launchers in the yard of a home in southern Lebanon, the identical location from where a rocket was fired into the Galilee last week.
"This is the same type that was on the ship and is shipped from Iran to Hizbullah in Lebanon," the IDF said.
Meanwhile Thursday, defense officials issued criticisms of Egypt, which they said had failed to properly inspect the Iranian containers as they sat waiting to be loaded onto the Francop at the Diametta Port on the Mediterranean side of the Suez Canal. The containers were clearly marked as belonging to the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines (IRISL), which is a company that is known to assist the regime in illegal arms trafficking to Hizbullah.
"United Nations Security Council Resolution 1803 explicitly asks countries to board and inspect IRISL ships and containers," one official said. "The Egyptians could have done more."
Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Fred ||
11/07/2009 00:00 ||
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#2
Meanwhile Thursday, defense officials issued criticisms of Egypt, which they said had failed to properly inspect the Iranian containers as they sat waiting to be loaded
Translation: We would like to thank Egyptian intelligence for the heads up.
[Iran Press TV Latest] After a massive turnout in a pro-government rally on the 30th anniversary of the US embassy takeover in Tehran, a senior cleric brands US longing for an uprising in Iran as "false hope."
"The US government should not put its faith in a small group of protestors and expect them to change the country's course," said Tehran's Interim Friday Prayers Leader Seyyed Ahmad Khatami.
Ayatollah Khatami said the high turnout in the recent rallies prove that the younger generation of Iranians is just as committed to the principles of the Islamic Revolution as "their revolutionary forefathers."
"People have marched in hundreds of thousands to show their support and loyalty to the government, they were no match for the demonstrators, who gathered in hundreds to chant opposition slogans."
"Western countries, particularly the United States, should not expect a major turn of events in Iran. There is nothing going on in the country," he said.
Ayatollah Khatami was referring to a massive wave of rallies marking the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran more than thirty years ago.
University students, convinced of a US plot against the Islamic Revolution, stormed the American embassy on November 4, 1979, only months after the Western-backed Pahlavi regime was toppled in Iran.
After finding shredded documents inside the embassy that proved their convictions to be true, Iranians held hostage fifty-two Americans for 444 days and demanded an official apology from the US for its destructive role in the county. November 4, has since been commemorated as the national day of fighting global arrogance
Iranians also called for the unfreezing of the country's assets in US and urged Washington officials to promise not to interfere in Iran's internal affairs.
The hostage-taking marked the end of Washington-Tehran relations and eventually resulted in the Algiers Accords in January 19, 1981.
Under the agreement, Washington promised that "It is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran's internal affairs."
However, the agreement has been breached by the United States on numerous occasions.
Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Fred ||
11/07/2009 00:00 ||
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The UN's nuclear watchdog has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, the Guardian has learned.
The very existence of the technology, known as a "two-point implosion" device, is officially secret in both the US and Britain, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design. The development was today described by nuclear experts as "breathtaking" and has added urgency to the effort to find a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis.
The sophisticated technology, once mastered, allows for the production of smaller and simpler warheads than older models. It reduces the diameter of a warhead and makes it easier to put a nuclear warhead on a missile.
Documentation referring to experiments testing a two-point detonation design are part of the evidence of nuclear weaponisation gathered by the IAEA and presented to Iran for its response. The dossier, titled "Possible Military Dimensions of Iran's Nuclear Program", is drawn in part from reports submitted to it by western intelligence agencies.
Don't worry, the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate told us that Iran had stopped its nuclear weaponization efforts in 2003, so none of this can be true.
The agency has in the past treated such reports with scepticism, particularly after the Iraq war. But its director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, has said the evidence of Iranian weaponisation "appears to have been derived from multiple sources over different periods of time, appears to be generally consistent, and is sufficiently comprehensive and detailed that it needs to be addressed by Iran".
Translation: "From whom did you purchase your expertise?" Not that the sellers will be punished in any way, per Dr. El Baradei's personal tradition.
Extracts from the dossier have been published previously, but it was not previously known that it included documentation on such an advanced warhead. "It is breathtaking that Iran could be working on this sort of material," said a European government adviser on nuclear issues.
James Acton, a British nuclear weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said: "It's remarkable that, before perfecting step one, they are going straight to step four or five ... To start with more sophisticated designs speaks of level of technical ambition that is surprising."
The Iranians have a limited amount of time. Either the Israelis are going to whack them, the Western world will find a spine, or Khamenei and the rest of the Mad Mullahs grow old and die. So it's off to step five as quick as they can.
Another western specialist with extensive knowledge of the Iranian programme said: "It raises the question of who supplied this to them. Did AQ Khan [a Pakistani scientist who confessed in 2004 to running a nuclear smuggling ring] have access to this, or is it another player?"
The Iranians are not stupid. They understand that a two-point implosion device is possible. The theory is known. The end-result is known. The rest is a matter of engineering.
Nonetheless, why keep your own engineers from working on something else, eg. a beautiful plaque saying "Property of the University of Tehran", when the manufacturing process can be purchased turnkey from North Korea or China?
Iran has rejected most of the IAEA material on weaponisation as forgeries, but has admitted carrying out tests on multiple high-explosive detonations synchronised to within a microsecond. Tehran has told the agency that there is a civilian application for such tests, but has so far not provided any evidence for them.
Haven't you heard? Tehran University plans to get its electrical power from a linked series of nuclear explosions, rather like a car is powered a multiple cylinder engine.
Western weapons experts say there are no such civilian applications,
Of course they think that. The U of T physics professors have not yet published their results.
but the use of co-ordinated detonations in nuclear warheads is well known. They compress the fissile core, or pit, of the warhead until it reaches critical mass.
Another option, I s'pose.
A US national intelligence estimate two years ago said that Iran had explored nuclear warhead design for several years but had probably stopped in 2003.
Perhaps one of the most blatant political documents of our time, designed to freeze the Bush administration. It worked. Now we pay the price, but the authors of that NIE piece are on to other things. That should worry us.
Nah, the cleverboots at the CIA knew all about the U of T project. Who d'you think wrote up the results?
British, French and German officials have said they believe weaponisation continued after that date and may still be continuing.
In September, a German court found a German-Iranian businessman, Mohsen Vanaki, guilty of brokering the sale of dual-use equipment with possible applications in developing nuclear weapons. The equipment included specialised high-speed cameras, of the sort used to develop implosion devices, as well as radiation detectors. According to a report by the Institute for Science and International Security, the German foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, testified at the trial that there was evidence that Iran's weapons development was continuing.
The IAEA is seeking to find out what the scientists and the institutions involved in the experiments are doing now, but has so far not been given a response. The agency's repeated requests to interview Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, whose name features heavily in the IAEA's documentation and who is widely seen as the father of the Iranian nuclear programme, have been turned down.
The agency has also asked Iran to explain evidence that a Russian weapons expert helped Iranian technicians to master synchronised high-explosive detonations.
The first implosion devices, like the "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August 1945, used 32 high-explosive hexagons and pentagons arrayed around a plutonium core like the panels of a football. The IAEA has a five-page document describing experimentation on such a hemispherical array of explosives.
According to a diplomat familiar with the IAEA documentation, the evidence also points to experiments with a two-point detonation system that represents "a more elegant solution" to the challenges of making a nuclear warhead, but it is much harder to achieve. It is used in conjunction with a non-spherical pit, in the shape of a rugby ball, or explosives in that shape wrapped around a spherical pit, and it works by compressing the pit from both ends.The IAEA has expressed "serious concern" about Iran's failure to give an account of the research its scientists have carried out.
Descriptions of "two-point implosion" warheads designs have occasionally appeared in the public domain (there are extensive descriptions on Wikipedia) and they were first developed by US scientists in the 1950s, but it remains an offence for American officials or even non-governmental nuclear experts with security clearance to discuss them.
Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Steve White ||
11/07/2009 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
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Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
The IDF issued Thursday what it said were damning photos showing Katyusha rockets discovered last week by UNIFIL troops in Lebanon that are of the same make as the rockets seized by the Navy when it boarded the Francop cargo ship Wednesday.
[Iran Press TV Latest] After a massive turnout in a pro-government rally on the 30th anniversary of the US embassy takeover in Tehran, a senior cleric brands US longing for an uprising in Iran as "false hope." 
The UN's nuclear watchdog has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, the Guardian has learned.
