Iran’s New Mohajer-10 Drone Shows It’s ‘Achieved Deterrence Without Nuclear Weapons’ - Expert
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Long accused by the US and Israel of secretly seeking to build nuclear weapons, Iran has instead pioneered a host of new conventional weaponry, from hypersonic missiles to combat drones and air defense systems. But that closing of the technological gap between East and West is exactly what the West fears, an expert said.
Iran has unveiled a new long-range medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) combat drone, the Mohajer-10, which has the capability of flying as far away as Israel. It can carry both reconnaissance and ground strike payloads as well as radar-jamming devices.
The long range was made explicit by a poster released by the Iranian government depicting the Mohajer-10 soaring over Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility with the words “Be ready to travel to the Stone Age” in Farsi and Hebrew.
Este es el nuevo Drone Mohajer 10, presentado por el Ministerio de Defensa de Irán, entre sus principales características destaca su autonomía de vuelo de hasta 24 hrs de forma continua a una altitud de 7 km y un radio operativo de 2.000 km, cuenta con una carga útil de 300 kg. pic.twitter.com/ac4yVlNDc2
— Roy Lugo (@Zroy34) August 22, 2023
Israel has long claimed Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program with which it intends to threaten Israel, and the Israeli government has threatened to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Tehran says its nuclear program is for electrical generation and medical research, not offensive weapons, which Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has declared to be against the values of Islam.
Laith Marouf, an award winning broadcaster and journalist based in Beirut, Lebanon, told Radio Sputnik on Wednesday that despite Israel’s claims, it’s been in the field of conventional weapons that Iran has made its biggest technological advancements in recent years, Marouf pointed out that nuclear weapons have little practical value since “they are nothing but deterrence.”
“Since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nobody has used nuclear weapons. They've just been that deterrence. And Iran, the Ayatollah, the head of the highest religious authority, has made a fatwa, a religious decree banning the use of nuclear weapons. And here we see Iran achieving deterrence without having to resort to nuclear weapons.”
He noted that for most of human history, Europeans were on-par with other peoples of the world in terms of technology, which prevented them from conquering much of the world as they did once they achieved superior technology in the 15th century CE. Much of the West’s anxieties about Iran and China threatening their rule of the world, he said, was about them developing new technologies that can equal or even exceed Western tech, threatening that gap that has allowed imperialism and colonialism to thrive for 600 years.
“Clearly right now Iran is at the cutting edge of military technology on a global scale. Many European countries that are part of NATO cannot even produce such weapons - they all depend on the United States to help them provide these drones and hypersonic missiles and what-have-you,” he noted.
“So Iran right now is probably one of the top five countries in the world in terms of advancements in military technologies. And that is something that Iranians as a people should be proud of..."
