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ROCKET SCIENCE 101

by Dr. Mitchell Finkel

Perhaps the gravest and arguably the least examined threat facing Israel today is the thicket of rockets that lay coiled around its heartland. For the Jihadist and their malefic entourage, the rocket has indeed become a wonder weapon. There is never a recruitment problem, their operational status is never in doubt and once they are launched, nullifying the end result is virtually impossible. While suicide bombing may have been the perfect strategem for terrorizing and tormenting Israel's citizenry, that strategem is hardly effective when directed at Israel's infrastructure. Rockets, obviously, do not discriminate between people and places. Unlike suicide bombers, rockets are designed to be equal opportunity devastators.

While Sharon is busy building his wall, the Arabs are busy building their wall - a wall of flaming vipers. In Gaza, rocket production has become a cottage industry. The flavor of the month is the Nasser III. It is easy to see why Hamas is so smitten with the Nasser. It is a model of simplicity. What's more, all of its components are off-the-shelf. A cylindrical tube, usually a steel water pipe, and a propellant, a mix of fertilizer and powdered sugar, are its main components. Now add a simple fuse and a car battery and you have a bargain-basement weapon with the block busting potential of a Scud missile. Before the introduction of the Nasser, most rockets streaming out of Gaza turned out to be duds. But now with the Nasser, just about every launch terminates in a detonation.

The Kassam is by all counts the most widely deployed rocket in the region. It is the reigning divinity in the Arab gallery of horrors. The earlier versions had a modest range of four to six miles and carried a 22 pound warhead. The more recent versions have doubled their operational range. Last summer, it is worth recalling, it was a frenzy of Kassams that rocked Ashkelon. Hamas and Hezbollah are convinced that rockets and mortars are destined to become their great equalizer. That in part explains their repeated attempts to open up a string of rocket producing workshops in Samaria, Judea and Gaza. Indeed, hardly a month goes by without uncovering another illicit workshop. According to Yuval Steinitz, the Chairman of Israel's Defense Committee, Hamas now has all of the resources needed for the production of swarms of Kassams.

Of course, the greatest concentration of rockets arrayed against the Jewish State is along the Lebanese border. Major General Aharon Ze'ev Farkarsh, Israel's Chief of Military Intelligence, believes that Hezbollah now has a stockpile of 13,000 short range rockets. These rockets are in the main derivatives of earlier versions of Chinese and Russian Katyushas. Their warheads range from a low of eighteen pounds to a high of about forty pounds. If we accept thirty pounds as the average weight for the aggregate, then 13,000 rockets armed with a thirty pound warhead would have the fire power of about 400,000 pounds of explosives. That, it turns out, is equivalent to two small Tactical Nuclear Weapons. That equivalence should engender a rush of wild foreboding in all of us. Hezbollah has also acquired a thicket of Fajr rockets. These Iranian produced rockets have a reach of about 46 miles and have a circle of accuracy of about a half mile. But there is an even more ominous prospect about to unfold. Hezbollah has begun to deploy a series of rockets with a reported range of 120 miles.

From Haifa and Tiberias in the north to Ashkelon and Be'er Sheva in the south, there is a blight of rockets that now lie ready and waiting to lacerate Israel's heartland. Every urban center and every industrial complex is literally moments away from some disaster. Just look at the numbers. Since the beginning of the Al Aqsa intifada, over 4200 rockets have slammed into the Jewish communities in Gaza. That averages out to about three hits per day. For the past few months, Sderot, which is inside the Green Line, has been pounded once or twice just about every day. In order to meet this threat, Israel has made a monumental effort to develop the Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser (MTHEL). The MTHEL can simultaneously track and engage dozens of incoming rockets - no small feat. Initially the system was slated for deployment in 2007. But it now seems that 2010 is a more realistic date. Between now and then, Israel's enemies likely might acquire a set of measures that will effectively marginalize the system.

So where does that leave us? It should be self evident that the only way to avert the daunting possibility that the Gaza Strip might become a vast launching pad for Nassers, Kassams and Fajrs is to have a continuing Iraeli presence on the ground. And it should also be self-evident that every withdrawal will expose yet another swath of Israel to a fire storm of rockets and mortars. If disengagement also means, as it probably does, abandoning large chunks of Judea and Samaria, then we should expect even greater chunks of Israel to become a wasteland of ruin and rubble. Pulling out of Gaza would be a strategic blunder of Biblical proportions. Pulling out of Gaza could turn all of Israel into a House of Mourners.

Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Force (IDF), has urged the Sharon government to rethink their approach to disengagement. Yaalon believes that a retreat from Gaza and Samaria will turn out to be a triumph for terrorism. Avi Dichter, the head of the General Securities Services put it more bluntly. When we pull out, he warned, the rockets will move in. Dichter's dire warning was substantiated by Colonel Pinkie Suarez, the Commander of the Southern Gaza Brigade. According to Suarez, there is a mountain of military hardware sitting in the Sinai waiting to be shipped and uncrated in Gaza.

There is a certain incoherence in Sharon's disengagement plan. Even if we accept his principal argument that protecting the settlers in prohibitively expensive, that argument has no relevance when applied to his declared intention to also withdraw the IDF. Gaza without the IDF is certain to slip into a sink of murder and madness. What's more, lessening our exposure in Gaza will only magnify our exposure elsewhere. But it is not only the withdrawal and expulsion that are so troubling. Thaere is also that fatuous fence. As the belt of rockets girdling Israel becomes tighter and tighter, the obtuseness of the Sharon government becomes thicker and thicker. Only the wise men of Chelm would think of building a ten foot high fence when your enemy is marshalling tends of thousands of rockets in your back yard. That fence, that two billion dollar extravaganza, is destined to become one of Israel's greatest fiascos.

The great tragedy of our time is not the evil that abounds. The great tragedy of our time is our willingness to appease rather than confront that evil.

Dr. Mitchell Finkel is a retired NASA physicist. He is currently vice president of Brandeis District of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).