Press TV: Iran planning indigenous S-300 missile system: Defense Minister

 
“We previously announced that manufacturing the system was on the agenda and although this important objective cannot be fulfilled quickly, the manufacturing stages are making good progress,” Vahidi said on Saturday.

Alluding to the latest breakthroughs by Iran’s Defense Ministry, Vahidi said, “We hope to present our missile and naval achievements in the near future.”

In early September, Commander of the Khatam al-Anbiya Air Defense Base Brigadier General Farzad Esmaili said that Iran has completed 30 percent of the production of the system, called Bavar (Belief) 373.

Iranian experts have completed the long-range missile system’s threat detection mechanism and manufactured its sensitive parts, Esmaili noted.

He expressed hope that the system will be complete by the end of the current Iranian calendar year (March 2013) or the next year. Under a contract signed in 2007, Russia was required to provide Iran with at least five S-300 air defense systems.

Moscow has been refusing to deliver the system to Iran under the pretext that it is covered by the fourth round of the UN Security Council sanctions resolutions against Iran.

[Editors Note:  One of the boomerangs of the Western sanctions is that they have only spurred Iranian development of domestic defense production, and accelerated the exports of electricity and gas through major new pipeline projects to insulate themselves from future sanctions.

Other nations have also learned that importing from Western nations who use sanctions as an offensive markerting tool just leaves them easier targets.There are major efforts for Asian countries now to set up their own trading financial clearing houses, and the SWIFT system’s days of monopoly are dwindling as I type.

The government air heads who dreamed up these Alice in Wonderland sanction scenarios will be long gone when the walls come tumbling down and Western production workers find markets closed off to them due to political treachery in their own commercial ranks…Jim W. Dean]

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