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Iran has test-fired a new air-to-surface missile, Iranian media reported Sunday, in the Islamic Republic's latest display of its military capability.

The missile test was carried out despite the offer by the administration of new U.S. President Barack Obama to engage Iran in direct talks if it "unclenches its fist."

Iran's Fars News Agency said the domestically produced missile had a range of 110 km (70 miles) and was designed for use by military aircraft against naval targets.

Iran has said it would respond to any attack by targeting U.S. interests and Israel, as well as closing the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway between the Gulf and the Sea of Oman through which about 40 percent of the world's traded oil is shipped.

One Western defense analyst said he believed the missile test was a signal by Iran that "we can severely disrupt traffic" in the Gulf if attacked.

"That's what would be the frightening thing for the West and the Middle East," Andrew Brookes of the International Institute for Strategic Studies think-tank in London said by phone.

"It's quite serious in acting on its own about a nuclear-armed Iran," former US ambassador to the United Nations Nancy Soderberg, one of the task force members who traveled to the region to research the report, said at a WINEP event held Wednesday on the report's release.

She noted that the timetable for an Israeli attack might be "significantly" moved up if Jerusalem believed Russia was going to make good on its pledge to supply Iran with the S-300 surface-to-air missile system, which would greatly complicate any Israeli attack.

He had, after all, taken public positions favoring diplomacy over force in Iran, greater troop withdrawals from Iraq than officially planned and more high-level attention to Afghanistan.

But the catalyst for his departure was not a policy disagreement with the White House, he said, but an article in Esquire magazine earlier this year that portrayed him as the man standing between President George W. Bush and war against Iran.