Scud Missile: The Failed Great Scud Hunt and the 1988 War of the Cities

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In the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein fired modified Scud missiles at Saudi Arabia and at Israel, which was not in the coalition, hoping an Israeli response would split off the Arab members of the U.S.-led alliance. The Great Scud Hunt followed: A-10s by day, F-15E Strike Eagles with LANTIRN pods and synthetic aperture radar by night, and British SAS teams, including the Bravo Two Zero patrol, searching wadis on the ground. Iraqi crews cut the Soviet manual's 90-minute launch routine to 30 minutes, firing from culverts and highway overpasses and driving off. After the ceasefire, UN inspectors found dozens of working missiles and launchers, and a Pentagon study could not confirm that coalition aircraft destroyed a single mobile launcher.

Scud is a NATO reporting name; the Soviets built the R-11 Zemlya and the R-17 Elbrus to deliver tactical nuclear strikes from mobile launchers that could survive a preemptive attack. Carried flat on the eight-wheeled MAZ-543 transporter erector launcher, the liquid-fuelled missile risked engine chugging from sloshing kerosene and nitric acid until engineers Viktor Makeyev and A.M. Isaev simplified the V-2 derived engine and added an anti-oscillation baffle. Egypt passed Scud-Bs to North Korea in the late 1970s; North Korea was producing clones by 1984 and then the Hwasong-5 and Hwasong-6, which Iran bought during the Iran-Iraq War and developed into its Shahab series.

• Iran's Qiam-1, developed before 2010, dropped the tail fins for active thrust vector control and used a blunt baby bottle warhead for stability on reentry.
• The original Scud-B had a circular error probable of about 450 meters, and Iraq's stretched Al Hussein variant traded accuracy for range.
• In the 1988 War of the Cities, Iraq launched nearly 190 missiles, 135 at Tehran, and about a quarter of the city's 10 million residents fled.
• Descending at around Mach 5, the warhead arrives before the sound of its approach.
• Afghanistan's communist government fired 1,700 to 2,000 Scuds between late 1988 and early 1992, more than 400 around Jalalabad, and a 1991 strike on a market in Asadabad killed 300 people.