Yes that weapon would make a lot more sense against a giant tanker (or against warships) than anything you could fire from your shoulder.
I think it sometimes gets played up to much, as an unstoppable super weapon. It isn't such a weapon. But it is apparently a powerful and potentially effective weapon. It is a weapon to be concerned about.
Sufficient to sink any number of tankers. Or carriers.
Tankers are slow and have no defenses, but they are big and tend not to sink easily. If they where carrying volatile refined products, or if you had a a build up of vapors from the oil they could blow up with one hit, but they tend to carry crude, and they have rather effective systems for dealing with vapor issues. Which doesn't mean they can't be sunk by sunburns but you would likely need multiple hits.
Carriers aren't as big, but they are very big and highly compartmentalized. They also get surrounded by many defensive escorts, and they have aircraft with a range that greatly exceeds the range of sunburn missiles.
The worry isn't probably as much sunk tankers and carriers, but heavily damaged (and leaking and/or burning) tankers, and heavily damaged or sunk smaller warships.
Of course Iran would be hit rather hard in response. In addition to the military response, they would lose their own export market (at least for the duration of the intense part of the conflict), they would lose their gasoline imports (they don't have enough refinery capacity to meet their own demand), and they would be ticking off most of the world, including their neighbors.
Blocking the straits with dead tankers might seem like a bad idea, however. Once the war has been 'won", presumably you would want to restart oil exports.
Yes. Of course new channels could be dug, or the tankers stacked on top of each other at the bottom could be broken up so that the debris wasn't high enough to block large tankers, but either option wouldn't exactly happen instantly, and in the meantime only small tankers could carry the oil (and the world doesn't have enough capacity in small tankers to carry all that oil, most tankers in modern times are built big) |
