Pentagon accuses Iran of improving missiles to target vessels

Iran’s army continues to improve the accuracy and killing power of its long-range and short-range ballistic missiles, including designing a weapon to target vessels, an Israeli online news website reported on Wednesday citing a report by the Pentagon submitted to the Congress. Israel’s Ynet cited the June 29 report, released by Bloomberg News, which was signed by U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, as stating that Tehran “has boosted the lethality and effectiveness of existing systems by improving accuracy and developing new submunition payloads” that extend the destructive power over a broader area than a solid warhead. The report mentioned that the Iranian improvements were in tandem with routine ballistic-missile training that “continues throughout the country” and the addition of “new ships and submarines.” According to the Ynet, the report also touched on Iran’s assistance to Syria, Lebanon’s armed group Hezbollah, Palestinian Hamas group and Iraq’s Shiite groups. The report reiterated that Iran with “sufficient foreign assistance may be technically capable of flight-testing” an intercontinental ballistic missile by 2015. The report also claimed that Iran is continuing to develop ballistic missiles capable of reaching as far as Israel and Eastern Europe. Senior diplomats from the European Union and Iran are scheduled to meet in Istanbul on July 24 for technical talks on Tehran’s disputed nuclear program to try to salvage diplomatic efforts to resolve the decade-long standoff. Iran and the six world powers agreed in June to use such discussions to decide whether diplomacy tackling broader political issues should continue in the face of vast differences in views over the nature of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. World powers suspect that Iran’s nuclear activities aim at creating a nuclear bomb, but the Islamic state denies the accusations and argue that its nuclear program has no military dimensions and that it is basically aimed for creating peaceful nuclear energy. The Ynet mentioned that the Pentagon’s report predicted that Tehran “would present a formidable force while defending Iranian territory.” “We assess with high confidence” that over the past 30 years Iran “has methodically cultivated a network of sponsored terrorist surrogates capable of targeting U.S. and Israeli interests. We suspect this activity continues,” the report said. The report also revealed that Tehran is looking to improve its missile counter-measures against U.S. and Gulf Cooperation Council missile defenses and poses a potential new threat to Gulf shipping. “This technology also may be capable of striking land-based targets,” the Pentagon’s report said. On July 1, the EU imposed an oil embargo on Tehran, adding to U.S. financial sanctions aimed at gutting Iran’s vital oil exports, which account for half of government revenues. In addition, Iran is under several sets of U.N. sanctions, imposed to force it to halt sensitive uranium enrichment, the most controversial part of Tehran’s nuclear drive. So far, Iran and the P5+1 group of powers -- the five permanent U.N. Security Council members plus Germany -- have failed to reconcile their views on the nuclear issue. Two days of high-level talks in Moscow last month produced no progress and were followed by a meeting of experts in Istanbul in early July aimed at avoiding a total breakdown of diplomacy. A statement from EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton after the Istanbul talks said the two sides continued to discuss the call for Iran to immediately stop enriching uranium to the high level of 20 percent in exchange for some forms of economic assistance, according to AFP. Iran insists on its right to enrich uranium and has sought an end to oil sanctions. Tehran has previously called for the sanctions to be eased, dubbing them as “hostile act against Iran.”