00:00Iran's Zafar-66 project, dating to the late 1990s, was a straightforward idea with uncomfortable
00:05implications. Take a Shahab-2 ballistic missile, hide it inside a ship that looks like an ordinary
00:10merchant vessel, and fire it from sea. The footage shows how it worked. Concealed launch
00:14bays open on what appears to be a commercial ship, and a Shahab-2 lifts off. The missile has
00:19a range of around 500 kilometers and can carry a warhead up to 770 kilograms, enough to do serious
00:25damage to a port and airfield or a military base. The missile wasn't new or particularly advanced.
00:30The platform was the point. A ballistic missile on a known launch site can be tracked, targeted,
00:34and in some cases preempted. A ballistic missile on a ship that looks like a cargo vessel is a
00:39different problem. It can move, it doesn't announce itself, and there are a lot of ships at sea.
00:44Zafar-66 didn't produce a fielded weapons system, but it demonstrated that Iran was thinking about
00:49the problem in ways that carried forward into later naval missile development.
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