![tomahawk cruise missile tomahawk cruise missile](https://navyadvancement.tpub.com/14145/img/14145_31_1.jpg)
President Barack Obama has also previously turned to cruise missiles. Osama bin Laden wasn’t in the camp and the owner of the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan said he had no links to the radical Islamic group.Ĭruise missiles also opened the Kosovo air war in 1999, knocking out Serb air defences so manned warplanes could follow with months of air strikes. Clinton sent 79 Tomahawks in twin strikes – one at a purported al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and the other at a factory suspected of making chemical weapons components in Khartoum. Orders from the Oval Office launched other small-scale “retaliatory” strikes using cruise missiles in the wake of the al-Qaeda bombings of American embassies in two African countries in 1998. Unbowed, President Saddam Hussein continued to taunt the United States until 2003, when then-president George W. Bill Clinton ordered the firing of a couple of dozen at Iraqi targets in 1993 after a plot to assassinate former president George H.W. More than 400 cruise missiles were the first “shots” fired in the 1991 Gulf War, but they have also been used in small salvos to send presidential messages of punitive disapproval. More than 120 cruise missiles – low-flying, jet-powered and packing a half-tonne warhead of high explosive – slammed into Libyan targets on March 19, 2011, destroying key headquarters, wrecking Colonel Moammar Gadhafi’s air defences and setting the stage for months of allied air strikes by manned warplanes.Ĭonceived during the Cold War to deliver smallish nuclear warheads – and tested in Canada’s remote northern territories – the Tomahawk has evolved into a new type of first-strike weapon, favoured by a succession of presidents.
![tomahawk cruise missile tomahawk cruise missile](https://en.protothema.gr/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/bgm-109g-block-iv-tomahawk-missile-3D-model_D.jpg)
They can serve as a terrifying curtain-raiser. warships and submarines in the Mediterranean.
![tomahawk cruise missile tomahawk cruise missile](https://live.staticflickr.com/2908/14193398306_1cfa98c45c_b.jpg)
For decades, the presidential weapon of choice to launch a big war or to punitively smack a defiant dictator has been the high-cost, low-risk, deadly accurate Tomahawk cruise missile.Īny punitive strike against Syria will almost certainly start with salvos of Tomahawks launched from U.S.