In April 2006, Iran successfully test-fired a new high-speed torpedo called Hoot. It was test-fired again last July, along with various other missiles.
“The torpedo is capable of destroying the largest warships and any other vessel on the surface or beneath the water, and split it into two parts,” according to an Iranian Naval Forces official.
Technical specifications (pdf) for components of the Hoot torpedo are presented in an Iranian document (in Farsi) that was provided to Secrecy News. The document appears to have been produced by a subunit of Iran’s Aerospace Industries Organization, according to a colleague who reviewed it.
“Only Iran and another country possess the technology to build this [torpedo],” the Iranian press reported after last July’s test, apparently referring to Russia and its Shkval torpedo. On 4 April 2006, Izvestiya Moscow said that the Hoot resembles the Shkval technically and in appearance, and that Shkval torpedoes may have found their way to Iran via China, where they were delivered in the mid-1990s. But Iranian officials insist the Hoot is a completely original production.
“From a tactical point of view,” said Rear Admiral Morteza Safari of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps naval forces, “what is of critical importance is that we are everywhere, while we are nowhere!” (Fars News Agency, July 10, 2008, via OSC).
“Let me briefly say that the intelligence that the Americans have about us is very different from the intelligence that they do not have about us,” he went on. “What I mean is that they have only little information, and there is a lot of intelligence that they are not aware of.”
Slashing research and development programs across the DOE, all while Congress rolls back clean energy tax incentives and programs, is not going to solve the nation’s energy emergency. It makes our current challenges even worse.
With strategic investment, cross-sector coordination, and long-term planning, it is possible to reduce risks and protect vulnerable communities. We can build a future where power lines no longer spark disaster and homes stay safe and connected — no matter the weather.
A lack of sustained federal funding, deteriorating research infrastructure and networks, restrictive immigration policies, and waning international collaboration are driving this erosion into a full-scale “American Brain Drain.”
With 2000 nuclear weapons on alert, far more powerful than the first bomb tested in the Jornada Del Muerto during the Trinity Test 80 years ago, our world has been fundamentally altered.