By Howard Bloom
Rupert Murdoch’s US Sun just headlined “The Complete Destruction of the UK in six minutes.” Why?
At 3:00 pm Moscow time on Wednesday, June 22nd, Vladimir Putin gave a speech to the top graduates of Russia’s military universities and military academies. In that speech, Putin made it clear that he has added nuclear weapons to what he sees as an all-out war with the West, the war in the Ukraine.
In today’s speech, Putin proclaimed that he is about to unleash the biggest nuclear missile in the world. “The first Sarmat launcher systems,” he proclaimed, “will enter combat duty shortly.”
The Sarmat, known in English as the Satan-2, is a rocket that carries sixteen nuclear warheads, some of them mounted on hypersonic glide missiles, glide missiles that, in theory, can get past all the missile defense systems of Europe and of the United States.
But that was just the beginning of the nuclear weapons Putin told the graduates that he was bringing into action.
Putin stressed that, “A crucial task…is to develop the nuclear triad.” A nuclear triad means the deployment of nuclear weapons delivery systems on land, sea, and in the air. Russia’s nuclear triad integrates nuclear missile carrying submarines, land-based nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, 70 nuclear bombers, and ship-launched nuclear missiles.
But the Russian nuclear triad is more advanced than ours. Over 90 of Russia’s nuclear missiles are mounted on mobile launchers. They can be hidden just about anywhere.
Our intercontinental ballistic missiles are in heavily reinforced nuclear silos. They have been stuck in fixed positions in the ground since the 1960s when we built the first of them. So the Russians and Chinese almost certainly know the location of every single one and could take out our nuclear missiles in a 21st century Pearl Harbor.
Meanwhile, the Satan 2, the Sarmat, is not the only weapon with which Putin says he will use nukes to establish “global stability”.
He announced to the military graduates that half his “Strategic Missile Forces have been equipped with the latest Yars systems.” The Yars are intercontinental ballistic missiles carrying ten nuclear warheads each.
Putin then told the graduates that Russia’s, “forces are being converted to advanced missile systems with the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle.” The Avangard is a hypersonic glide vehicle allegedly too fast and too maneuverable to be knocked out of the sky by our current missile defenses.
What’s more, you can fit 24 nuclear Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles in the nosecone of a single Satan 2 missile.
One more detail. Despite well-funded programs in place for fifty years, America and Europe have not developed a single mass-producible hypersonic weapon.
But that’s not the end of the nuclear tricks up Putin’s sleeve. Putin announced that “the master submarine of the new Borei-A project has joined the Navy.”
The Borei-A submarines are nuclear powered, highly maneuverable and ultra-quiet, making them difficult to detect. Each Borei-A sub carries up to 160 nuclear warheads, atop sixteen intercontinental ballistic missiles. Yes, 160 nuclear warheads in just one submarine.
And frosting the nuclear cake, Putin announced that a new, stealth-technology missile Frigate, the Admiral Gorshkov, “was put in combat duty.”
The Admiral Gorshkov, says Putin, “is armed with cutting-edge Tsirkon hypersonic missiles.” Tsirkon hypersonic missiles fly at up to nine times the speed of sound. They fly literally below the radar and maneuver to avoid defensive weapons. The Tsirkons, too, can carry nuclear warheads.
However the Ukrainians have managed to knock Tsirkons out of the sky with Patriot missiles. So there is hope.
But keep in mind Putin’s missile strategy. He has said that if he uses nukes, he will not just fire one or two. He will fire hundreds. Just like the storm of up to 90 missiles he has fired in a single day at the cities of Ukraine.
Why all these new nuclear weapons? In a brief speech after Putin’s address to the graduates today, Major-General Alexander Tokarev explained that, “Nazism has reared its head and is again trying to rule the world.” Nazism? Really?
Added Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, “The collective West has unleashed a real war against Russia, and they are trying once again to break us.”
With that bizarre perception, it’s no wonder that Putin concluded, “Russian nuclear triad armaments make it possible to…maintain the global balance of forces.”
In other words, Putin’s nukes are designed to keep the “collective West” in check. Or to destroy it.
References:
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/71472
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/71474
https://www.the-sun.com/news/8421543/putin-worlds-most-powerful-nuke-satan-battle-threat/
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a39827639/russia-sarmat-nuclear-tipped-missile/
Jill Hruby, Hypersonic Delivery Systems: Russia’s New Nuclear Weapon Delivery Systems: An Open-Source Technical Review, Nuclear Threat Initiative (2019), http://www.jstor.com/stable/resrep19984.8
https://www.nps.gov/articles/minuteman-missiles-on-the-great-plains.htm
https://missilethreat.csis.org/country_tax/russia/
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his seven books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. He does news commentary at 1:06 am Eastern Time every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on Coast to Coast AM. For more, see http://howardbloom.institute.