ABSTRACT
Until the early 1980s interest in ballistic missile threats extended only to the enormous, and nuclear-armed, Soviet inventory. Even when the possibility of a conventionally armed ballistic missile threat emerged, it was still within a Cold War, Soviet context. But as Cold War tensions eased in the late 1980s, a new dimension to the missile problem was revealed when, during the Iran-Iraq ‘War of the Cities’ in 1987-88, approximately 650 shorter-range ballistic missiles were fired.1
