Iran Defense

Businesses or governments in at least 26 countries have sold weapons to both sides in the Iran-Iraq War, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said in its annual report Wednesday. Policy-makers are losing control of the arms trade to businessmen, and many of the sales took place without the knowledge or support of the governments named, the institute said in its 1986 yearbook.

More than two years after California required the sale of investments in foreign companies operating in Iran's defense and energy industries, the state's biggest public pension fund still hasn't sold any of its $900 million in holdings in those firms. On Wednesday, legislators heard criticism from Jewish groups and an Iranian torture victim contending that the California Public Employees' Retirement System and to a lesser extent the State Teachers' Retirement System are flouting a 2007 law designed to bring pressure on the Islamic Republic.

The Silkworm missile is a Chinese copy of a Soviet surface-to-surface missile known as the SS-N-2, or Styx, primarily used as a shipborne offensive weapon or as part of a coastal defense system. The land-based version that Iran has is easily transportable aboard trucks and could be hard to find in a retaliatory raid, military analysts said Friday.

The Obama administration signaled its intention Friday to push for new sanctions against Iran, warning that tough new measures are likely now and urging reluctant nations not to circumvent them. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who is visiting Iraq, said world powers soon would agree on "significant additional sanctions." Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, meanwhile, warned in Washington that Latin American countries, in particular, will face "consequences" if they "flirt" with the Islamic Republic.

The commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards said Saturday that Tehran is making its own version of the U.S. Stinger anti-aircraft missile, the Iranian news agency IRNA reported. Mohsen Rafighdost, head of the Revolutionary Guards, told a news conference that Iran had previously obtained Stinger missiles and is successfully copying them, IRNA reported. It gave no other details. The news agency had reported earlier that Iranian forces in patrol boats fired Stinger surface-to-air missiles at U.S.

A bipartisan group of 17 U.S. senators has sent an unusual classified letter to Secretary of State James A. Baker III complaining about recent arms sales by China to countries such as Iran, according to U.S. and congressional sources. The letter, sent a week ago, was signed by Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) and by leading Democratic and Republican members of the Senate Foreign Relations, Armed Services and Intelligence committees.

A missile-firing jet fighter, believed to be an Iranian F-4 Phantom, attacked a Liberian-flag tanker in Iran's first such aerial raid on shipping in more than two years, according to Persian Gulf sources. The warplane fired two missiles at the 39,008-ton Petrobulk Pilot, maritime salvage executives said, but both missed. The Iranians, whose air force consists mainly of aging Phantoms and other U.S.

Although Iran's sudden acceptance this week of a U.N. cease-fire resolution in its war with Iraq surprised many U.S. experts, its previous determination to keep fighting had surprised them even more. A steady string of crucial setbacks on the battlefield in the last year and a critical shortage of military supplies had wiped out any reasonable chance that Iran could win a military victory.

China, which by official U.S. estimates has sold more than $1 billion worth of arms to Iran, on Tuesday gave President Reagan a carefully qualified commitment to the idea of an arms embargo against the Tehran regime as a means of ending the Iran-Iraq War, the White House announced. According to presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, Chinese Foreign Minister Wu Xueqian said that China would support a U.N.

Despite U.S. intelligence findings that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program four years ago, the Bush administration stepped up its efforts to portray Tehran as a threat, with Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates insisting that the program could be restarted at any time. Gates told a gathering of Middle East leaders here today that the Iranian government remained a source of "instability and chaos" that was still hiding its nuclear ambitions from the international community.

Iran successfully tested its first solid-fuel surface-to-surface missile, state-run Tehran radio reported Thursday. The guided Fateh-110 missile was developed at the government-owned Aerospace Industries, the report said. "Fateh-110, a super-modern surface-to-surface missile, functions with combined solid fuel, is able to cause great damage and finds targets with accuracy," it said. "The missile is classified among Iran's most efficient missiles."

Russia's defense minister said Wednesday that his country will abide by international agreements concerning weapons sales to Iran, but he added that its stance won't preclude some arms deals, the Iranian state news agency reported. In the first visit by a Russian defense minister to Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Igor D. Sergeyev held a round of talks with Iranian military officials and said the countries' positions were close, the Islamic Republic News Agency, or IRNA, reported.

Ali Shamkhani might not be Iran's top military official today if only he had liked Los Angeles a bit more in the mid-1970s. After high school, Shamkhani went to Los Angeles with his father and two brothers. His brothers stayed, one to study medicine, the other mechanical engineering, but not Shamkhani. "I didn't approve of the culture," he explained during a recent conversation in his large office in Tehran's Defense Ministry Building No. 2.

The Clinton administration has issued a diplomatic warning to Moscow about Russian assistance to Iran's missile program--aid that could threaten U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, several Persian Gulf allies and Israel, senior administration officials say. Intelligence reports indicate that Russia recently transferred to Iran technology for the Russian SS-4 missile, which has a range almost three times greater than that of any missile now in Iran's arsenal.

A bipartisan group of 17 U.S. senators has sent an unusual classified letter to Secretary of State James A. Baker III complaining about recent arms sales by China to countries such as Iran, according to U.S. and congressional sources. The letter, sent a week ago, was signed by Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) and by leading Democratic and Republican members of the Senate Foreign Relations, Armed Services and Intelligence committees.

Iran's massive new arms buildup, a Libyan attempt to hire Russian nuclear experts and reports that Iran purchased three nuclear weapons have heightened fears here that the Soviet Union's breakup will spur nuclear proliferation and enable terrorists to acquire weapons of mass destruction. U.S.

U.S. military planners have been told to create a new policy for the Persian Gulf emphasizing defense of friendly Arab states instead of Iran's vulnerability to a Soviet attack. The threat of a Soviet thrust into Iran to seize oil fields and gulf ports long has dictated U.S.