Why The Arrow Is So Good...

The Jerusalem Post has an article today about the Ten Greatest Israeli Inventions.

They've got good ones listed, like the Uzi submachine gun, drip irrigation, the swallowable camera (for looking at the GI tract), and the Internet firewall. But there's quite a quote from the inventor of the Arrow anti-missile defense system. See, the way the Arrow works is by zooming up near the incoming bad-guy's missile and exploding, sending shrapnel into the bad-guy's missile and destroying it. This method of defense is especially effective as a deterrent against non-conventional weapons:

The idea is that the explosion takes out the enemy missile and any nonconventional payload it carries; if nuclear, chemical, or biological substances remain, the physics are such that it would land on enemy states. "The shit will go back to the Arabs. This is a very nice feature of the system. We didn't create it, but it's very nice," Raviv says. (emphasis added)

One reason, perhaps, for the reticence of Saddam Hussein to lob missiles at Israel this time around...