Tehran: For an Israeli attack, four Iranian missiles would hit a million Israelis

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report November 6, 2011

Nuclear-capable Kh-55 missile

The Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) new agency Fars headlined a threat Sunday, Nov. 6: Four Iranian missiles can destroy tiny Israel, said the paper in Tehran’s first reaction to the flood of conflicting reports about a possible Israel attack on Iran’s nuclear sites. However, Iran’s leaders are divided on how to assess the seriousness of an Israeli or American threat to their nuclear program and this is reflected in their various media.
The writer of the Fars story is identified by debkafile’s Iranian sources as Saad-allah Zarey, its senior military commentator and a crony of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He stressed that the four missiles capable of causing the Zionist entity a million casualties would be conventional.
According to those sources point that the experiences of the Gulf war show that this number of ordinary missiles could not cause anything like the damage calculated by the writer. What Zarey may be referring to are the stubborn rumors going around Western intelligence circles since early 2005 that during the breakup of the Soviet Union, Tehran laid hands on black market nuclear cruise missiles form the Ukraine and 3 to 5 more from Belarus.
debkafile cites a BBC report of March 18, 2005:
Ukrainian arms dealers smuggled 18 nuclear-capable cruise missiles to Iran and China in 1999-2001, Ukraine’s prosecutor-general has said. The Soviet-era Kh-55 missiles – also known as X-55s – have a maximum range of 2,500km. They are launched by long-range bombers. The Kh-55, known in the West as the AS-15, is designed to carry a nuclear warhead with a 200-kiloton yield.
Our military sources add that with these missiles in hand, Iranian warplanes could bombard Israel 1,200 kilometers away without leaving their own air space.
The Ukrainian prosecutor-generalclaimed at the time that the missiles were not exported with nuclear warheads.
However our sources cite Western intelligence as suspecting that Tehran obtained those warheads from Belarus or from unconventional arms traffickers based in the Muslim Republics which were part of the USSR up until the 1990s. And indeed the Fars report did not specify what warheads the “conventional” missiles would carry.