Harpoon Missile: Denmark's Oops Missile, the Eilat and a Black Sea Sinking

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In September 1982 the Danish Navy accidentally fired a live Harpoon anti-ship missile into Lumsås, a quiet vacation housing area, an incident remembered in Denmark as the Hovsa or "Oops" missile. The weapon itself grew out of panic. In October 1967 an Egyptian missile boat sank the Israeli destroyer Eilat with a Soviet P-15 Termit, known to NATO as the Styx, and in 1970 Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo Zumwalt launched Project 60 to speed up an over-the-horizon anti-ship missile. McDonnell Douglas, now Boeing, delivered the first Harpoon in 1977: a sea-skimming missile that uses a radar altimeter to fly just above the waves and stay hidden below the radar horizon.

The Harpoon's combat record is tangled. Iran used U.S.-supplied Harpoons against Iraqi ships in Operation Morvarid in 1980, then the U.S. Navy used Harpoons to sink the Iranian frigate Sahand in Operation Praying Mantis in 1988. That same year, an inert Harpoon fired by an F/A-18 during an exercise off Hawaii locked onto an Indian merchant ship that had strayed into the range, killing one sailor. In June 2022 Ukraine sank the Russian Black Sea Fleet tug Vasily Bekh with two Harpoons despite a Tor air defense system on its deck, and U.S. Special Operations Command is now adapting the missile for the AC-130J Ghostrider gunship.

• Air-launched AGM-84s need no booster, ship-launched RGM-84s use a solid rocket booster, and submarine UGM-84s ride a buoyant capsule out of a torpedo tube to the surface.
• The rare Block 1D added a larger fuel tank so a missile that missed could fly a cloverleaf pattern and search again.
• Block II borrowed the inertial unit from the JDAM program and added GPS to navigate cluttered coastlines.
• In 2009 the U.S. accused Pakistan of modifying Harpoons for land attack; Pakistan denied it, and U.S. inspections resolved the issue.
• More than 7,500 Harpoons have been built, and the Block II Plus ER reaches over 167.5 nautical miles at roughly $1.2 million per missile.