WASHINGTON — Iran reported on Monday that it successfully test-fired its most advanced and powerful medium-range missiles in war games intended to deter the country's enemies.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps tested the Shahab-3 and Sejil missiles in the third phase of a two-day exercise called The Great Prophet IV, state-run news media reported.
Some believe the missiles are capable of striking Israel, U.S. military targets in the Middle East and parts of southeast Europe.
But Brig. Gen. Hossein Salami, commander of the Revolutionary Guard Air Force, said the test-firings were part of exercises to practice "preventive and defensive operations." They are "in no way a threat to neighboring countries," Iranian news media quoted him as saying. The tests, rather, send "a message for certain greedy nations that seek to create fear to show that we are able to give a swift and suitable answer to our enemies."
"The armed forces of the Islamic Republic are now more powerful than ever and fully prepared to foil foreign threats," said Maj. Gen. Yahya Rahim Safavi, military adviser to Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Specifically, Iranian Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi warned Israel against carrying out threats to attack Iran's nuclear sites.
"If this happens, which, of course, we do not foresee, its ultimate result would be that it expedites the Zionist regime's last breath," Vahidi said on state television.
Iran's Foreign Ministry denied a connection between the tests and a dispute with the United States and other nations over Iran's newly disclosed underground uranium enrichment plant.
American officials suspect that Iran intends to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons.
The exercises were routine and had been planned long before the latest nuclear controversy, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said.
Representatives of Iran and six major powers, including the United States, plan to discuss the issue on Thursday in Geneva. Iran has repeatedly denied that it intends to produce nuclear weapons.
At a conference of European Union defense ministers in Sweden on Monday, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana called on Iran to immediately resolve issues surrounding the new enrichment facility near Qom and said the missile tests also have raised concerns.
According to Iran's Press TV, the "optimized Shahab-3" missile's range is 807 miles to 1,242 miles. It did not give a range or precise designation for the Sejil missile but said it is a "two-stage missile powered by solid fuel which was tested by the [Revolutionary Guard Corps] for the first time in the maneuver." Both missiles "accurately hit their designated targets," Press TV reported.
In May, however, Press TV reported a successful firing of the Sejil-2 surface-tosurface missile, which it said it first tested eight months earlier. Unlike the Shahab-3,which burns liquid fuel, the Sejil-2 uses solid fuel, making it faster to prepare for launch, Press TV said, and that it is more accurate than the Shahab-3, an older missile based on the Soviet-designed Scud.
"Iranian missiles are able to target any place that threatens Iran," top Revolutionary Guard commander Abdollah Araqi told the semiofficial Fars news agency.
Salami, the Revolutionary Guard air force chief, said Iranian experts had increased the range of the tested missiles, updated their technical and navigation systems and reduced their launch times. It was not immediately possible to verify the claims. During a similar exercise last year, the Revolutionary Guards doctored pictures of a failed missile launch.
Amid growing international pressure in advance of Thursday's highly anticipated talks on Iran's nuclear program, meanwhile, senior Obama administration officials said they have the international support to impose crippling sanctions if Tehran does not stop construction of its new uranium-enrichment plant and allow immediate inspections.
"There is obviously the opportunity for severe additional sanctions" after disclosures two days ago by the United States, Britain and France of the secret Iranian facility beneath the mountains near the city of Qom, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said as reports emerged of the Iranian test launches.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs called the missile test typical of the "provocative" acts bythat country's government and said it demonstrates the need for international pressure to keep Iran from building nuclear arms.
"There has never been a stronger international consensus" than exists now for addressing Iran's nuclear program, Gibbs said, and Iran must show its intentions at the Geneva talks by agreeing to "immediate unfettered access" to international inspectors.
In Tehran, opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi spoke out Monday against any sanctions, saying they would force ordinary people to pay the price of the "wrong and adventurist foreign policies of the government."
In a statement posted on a Web site affiliated with him, Mousavi said, "Sanctions will cause great pain to many people for whom the plight of being ruled by paranoid statesmen is enough." A former prime minister, Mousavi has emerged as the leading political foe of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after a disputed presidential election in June.
All options remain on the table for dealing with Iran, Gates said, but "the reality is, there is no military option that does nothing more than buy time" in preventing what the United States has said is Iran's determination to acquire nuclear weapons capability.
"The only way you end up not having a nuclear-capable Iran is for the Iranian government to decide that their security is diminished by having those weapons, as opposed to strengthened."
Revelations about the new facility, which officials have said could be ready in 2010 to produce enough weapons-grade material for one nuclear bomb a year, did not change the overall U.S. assessment that Iran could produce a warhead within one to three years, he said.
In an interview broadcast on CBS's Face the Nation, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the administration believed that Russia, which previously objected to harsher sanctions against Iran, was now moving in Washington's direction. "I think Russia has begun to see many more indications that Iran is engaging in threatening behavior," Clinton said in the interview, which was taped Friday.
"The Iranians keep insisting, 'No, no, this is just for peaceful purposes,'" she said. "Well, I think, as the Russians said in their statement, and as we believe, and what this meeting on October 1st is to test, is: Fine, prove it; don't assert it, prove it."
Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said after meeting with his Iranian counterpart, Manouchehr Mottaki, at the United Nations in New York that he urged Tehran to be "maximally cooperative" in its contacts with the International Atomic Energy Agency regarding its previously undisclosed uranium enrichment facility.
"We proceed from the assumption that the Iranian side got the message, and we shall see a result of our conversation in Geneva," Lavrov said, according to the ITARTass and RIA Novosti news agencies.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev opened the door for possible sanctions after a meeting with President Barack Obama last week but hinted that Iran's offer to open its new uranium enrichment site to International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and other measures might be enough to satisfy Moscow.
Information for this article was contributed by William Branigin, Thomas Erdbrink, Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung of The Washington Post, Vladimir Isachenkov of The Associated Press and Nicholas Johnston, Kate Andersen Brower and Ladane Nasseri of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 1, 2 on 09/29/2009