Israel successfully test-launched its American-financed Arrow anti-tactical ballistic missile Thursday, convincing some well-informed observers that Israel has the “great power capacity” to design and construct highly sophisticated technological and defense equipment.
Its first test coincided with the Persian Gulf crisis, precipitated when Iraq invaded Kuwait a week ago and threatened Saudi Arabia.
The test was actually scheduled and announced three weeks earlier, but was postponed for technical and meteorological reasons.
In any case, the Arrow is still years away from being a deterrent to an Iraqi missile strike on Israel, against which Israel says it has other means of defense and retaliation.
Development of the Arrow, initiated in July 1988, will take another three years, and equipping it with a warhead two or three more years before it becomes operational.
The Arrow, known by its Hebrew name Hetz, is a product of the state-owned Israel Aircraft Industries.
The ballistic missile is part of the American Strategic Defense Initiative, known as “Star Wars,” the controversial project for an antinuclear defense shield that originated with the Reagan administration but has since been scaled down for technological and economic reasons.
The United States, however, is underwriting 80 percent of Israel’s $158 million long-term design and development costs, under an agreement it first discussed more than four years ago with then Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Rabin, now a Knesset member and No. 2 man in the opposition Labor Party, did not attend the Arrow’s maiden launch Thursday.
Although he was one of the initiators of U.S.-Israeli cooperation in the sphere of missile defense, he was not invited, Rabin told reporters.
The Arrow has been described as a “flying rocket with a computer brain which takes off at some seven times the speed of sound to intercept and destroy incoming medium- to short-range missiles.”
The United States relies on the slower Patriot intercontinental anti-ballistic missile to shield against trans-oceanic attacks.
But it is interested in the Arrow to deal with shorter-range nuclear missiles that might be fired from enemy submarines
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