Ukraine arms dealers sold cruise missiles to Iran and China

BBC:

Ukrainian arms dealers smuggled 18 nuclear-capable cruise missiles to Iran and China in 1999-2001, Ukraine's prosecutor-general has said.

The Kh-55 missiles - also known as X-55s - have a range of 3,000km (1,860 miles), the UK's Financial Times newspaper reports.

Official Ukrainian state bodies were not involved in the sales, the prosecutor-general's office said.

It added that the missiles were not exported with nuclear warheads.

...

The smuggling happened while Leonid Kuchma was president of Ukraine. His administration was voted out of office in December.

The Financial Times reports that the missiles could reach Japan if fired from mainland Asia or Israel if fired from Iran.

Ukraine had about 1,000 of the missiles after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, which were earmarked either to be transferred to Russia or to be scrapped, the paper says.

The Kh-55, known in the West as the AS-15, is designed to carry a nuclear warhead with a 200-kiloton yield.

Wny would Iran need such a missile? It looks like it might be a good delivery vehicle for the nuclear bomb it claims it is not building.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more