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The Arab States Have Four Minutes to Act If Iran Fires a Missile
(Defense One) Marcus Weisgerber - If Iran launches a ballistic missile at the Middle East, nuclear or not, Arab states would have as little as four minutes to act before impact. Ideally, the launch would be detected, the missile tracked during its flight by radar and its trajectory then passed to an interceptor missile, which would collide with the Iranian missile as it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere. But which country would shoot down the missile? So, the U.S. is renewing its push during this week's Gulf Cooperation Council summit outside Washington to get Arab states to link-up the missile interceptors and radars into a single Middle East missile shield. And while the Gulf states have purchased top-end missile interceptors, they do not have the sophisticated radars and satellites that the Pentagon uses to track ballistic missiles.