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.”
Congress must enact a Digital Public Infrastructure Act, a recognition that the government’s most fundamental responsibility in the digital era is to provide a solid, trustworthy foundation upon which people, businesses, and communities can build.
To increase the real and perceived benefit of research funding, funding agencies should develop challenge goals for their extramural research programs focused on the impact portion of their mission.
Without trusted mechanisms to ensure privacy while enabling secure data access, essential R&D stalls, educational innovation stalls, and U.S. global competitiveness suffers.
Satellite imagery has long served as a tool for observing on-the-ground activity worldwide, and offers especially valuable insights into the operation, development, and physical features related to nuclear technology.