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Pakistan Successfully Test Fires Its Babur Missile, But Babur Is No Match For India’s BrahMos
The BrahMos missile
Pakistan announced on Wednesday evening that it has successfully test-fired the version 2 of its Babur Cruise Missile. This missile is a low-flying, terrain-hugging missile with a range of 700 kilometres.
However, the Babur is far inferior to India's BrahMos, which travels at supersonic speeds of up to Mach 3 (as compared to Babur's sub-sonic Mach 0.8). This gives it much better target penetration and it cannot be intercepted by most existing missile defence systems. Even though Babur's range is longer than BrahMos', its subsonic speed means it can be intercepted by anti-missile shields like Israel's Iron Dome and India's AAD.
Also, even though Pakistan claims that Babur is indigenously developed, weapons experts say that it is based on the Kh-55SM/Korshun LACM, whose detailed production engineering data packages were bought from Kiev by 2001. Babur's design shows the influence of the USA's BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missile, which Pakistan is said to have reverse-engineered after six Tomahawks crash-landed on Pakistani territory in 2001 during US airstrikes on targets in Afghanistan.
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