The Argentine Condor missile program started in the 1970s as a multinational space research program with significant contract work being performed by German company MBB (now a group within Daimler AG).
The original Condor had little military capability but was used to build expertise that went into to the Alacrán program which was a functional short range ballistic missile. After the 1982 Falklands War's (Spanish: Guerra de las Malvinas) problems with French missiles (France placed an arms embargo during the conflict), the Argentine Air Force, under command of Ernesto Crespo, decided it was time have its own medium-range missile, and started the Condor II program.
This program was driven in close collaboration with Egypt, and then Iraq, but in the earliest 1990s Carlos Menem discontinued it because of political pressure from the United States. The missile was developed in Falda del Carmen, Córdoba Province. The designer and creator of the missile was the M. I. T. master of science and engineer Miguel Vicente Guerrero.-
It is believed that the Alacrán missile has been approved for deployment, but there are no evidence of such thing to have happened.
It is also believed that Libya has assumed the Condor II project around 1995. Extensive shifts in the Middle East have obscured the exact status of the Condor II program, but it was clearly the most promising of the Libyan missile programs.
In 1997 the Argentine Air Force reported to the US Congress that it still possessed 2 of the missiles that were to be destroyed.
Reports of a Condor III program are extensive. The Condor III would have an increased range to some 1,500 km (930 mi) with the same payload as the Condor II. It was however likely that this program ended with the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.
In the starting of 2011, Chile was in alert due to a supposed Condor II missile, which was assumed to target the city of Punta Arenas, and the people who found it claimed that the missile had a single nuclear warhead with the yield of 40 kilotons. Later, it was confirmed that it was not a missile, but an oil drilling rig.