Iran said it completed two days of missile tests that included launching its longest-range missiles yesterday, weapons capable of carrying a warhead and striking Israel, US military bases in the Middle East and parts of Europe.
State TV said the powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which controls Iran’s missile program, tested upgraded versions of the medium-range Shahab-3 and Sajjil missiles, which have a range of up to 2,000km. It was the third and final round of missile tests in two days of drills by the IRGC.
The Sajjil-2 missile is Iran’s most advanced two-stage surface-to-surface missile and is powered entirely by solid-fuel, while the older Shahab-3 uses a combination of solid and liquid fuel in its most advanced form, which is also known as the Qadr-F1.
Solid fuel is seen as a technological breakthrough for any missile program as it increases the accuracy of missiles in reaching targets.
The war games come at a time when Iran is under intense international pressure to fully disclose its nuclear activities.
They began on Sunday, two days after the US and its allies disclosed that Iran had been secretly developing an underground uranium enrichment facility and warned the country it must open the site to international inspection or face harsher international sanctions.
General Hossein Salami, head of the IRGC Air Force, said on Sunday the drills were meant to show Tehran is prepared to crush any military threat from another country.
Meanwhile, Iranian Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi warned Israel yesterday against launching any attack on the Islamic Republic, saying it would only speed up the Jewish state’s own demise.
“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.
Israeli leaders have repeatedly expressed alarm over Iran’s nuclear ambitions and refused to rule out pre-emptive military action to stop Iran developing an atomic weapon.
Iran, which says its nuclear work is for peaceful power generation, has often shrugged off the possibility of any such strikes.
Vahidi, a former IRGC commander, said that in the event of an Israeli attack, its “lifespan, which is today coming to an end, would be speeded up.”
He said that the “Zionist regime,” the term Iran uses for Israel, was on a “slope of destruction.”
On Saturday, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said a newly disclosed nuclear facility in Iran was proof the Islamic Republic was seeking nuclear weapons and called on the world to make an “unequivocal” response.
Israel, widely assumed to be the Middle East’s sole nuclear power, has described Iran’s uranium enrichment as a threat to its existence. It says “all options” are on the table in preventing Tehran from building nuclear missiles.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s spokesman said yesterday that Iran’s missile tests were “a matter of concern,” but added that London’s focus remained on Tehran’s atomic program.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has