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New Russian Weapon Hides In Shipping Container
shmG writes "A Russian company is marketing a devastating new cruise missile system that can be hidden inside a shipping container, giving any merchant vessel the capability to wipe out an aircraft carrier. Potential customers for the formidable 'Club-K' system include Kremlin allies Iran and Venezuela, say defense experts. They worry that countries could pass on the satellite-guided missiles, which are very hard to detect, to terrorist groups. This is a scary new development in the global arms race that allows for the proliferation of cruise missiles to anyone who will pay for them — even terrorists. This could be the next big thing in strategic weapons, as they can appear anywhere there is a container ship. The company even made a commercial and posted it onto the Internet." The article notes that a Russian defense expert said that "as far as he understood, the Club-K was still at the concept stage."
I really hope a single cruise missile can't take out an aircraft carrier, if they can, then you have far bigger problems that missiles in merchant ships. They or their escorts should have the defenses to evade or destroy most missile types.
Is this a response to yesterday's story about the USA's dick-waving about building new missiles that can reach anywhere on Earth...?
No sig today...
Actually when I read this earlier in today's news paper I thought it makes total sense from a military/strategic point of view. And I was actually wondering why no-one else had thought of this before. Or maybe they are just not advertising it openly.
When it comes to transportation and handling of the equipment, a shipping container is great as it is standardised and fits easily on vessels, trains, trucks, and can be handled with standard lifting equipment.
The down side of course is the disappearance of the civil/military divide, which of course has already happened in many conflicts.
There is a simple resolution to this new weapon: countries known to be in the market for it will have their civilian merchant fleet classified as legitimate military targets.
Unsophisticated missiles are not THAT hard to get a hold of already, ranging from Palestinian homebrews to enhanced Scuds.
But they don't have a great success rate, especially against military targets, and notably naval ones.
Exocets, on the other hand, do have a good success rate, and can be launched from improvised platforms, as proven by the Argentines during the Falklands conflict.
Whilst a major asset such as carrier is normally well-protected by a screen of other ships, it could be very vulnerable when in confined areas, such as the Straits of Hormuz...
Would the Russian Government be happy to hand-out weapons that could just as easily be used against them? Maybe not.
It's perhaps more likely that the Iranians will develop increasingly sophisticated weapons themselves. They're already quite well advanced...
Quite independently of whether that weapon is vaporware or not, the fact remains that advances in military hardware will end up percolating to the general public, if said public has enough money. What some years away were classified chips nowadays are available off-the-shelf. Guidance software, once leaked, is easy to copy. A disgruntled scientist is all that is needed to transfer loads of tech. Everybody keeps getting better at making things that fly. Look at the advance of the Chinese weaponry in the last years. They simply throw enough money at it, and they got mostly all the tech they needed. In some years, everybody and its dog will have enough firepower to down an aircraft carrier. I've seen posts saying that they should be able to block most missiles. Well, that's all right, except when you are faced with a hundred of them at the same time.
In a similar note, I'm not altogether sure that the recent move to the "non-nuclear ICBM" is a smart one. People are scared of using nuclear weapons, which is a sound attitude. That leads to treaties of non proliferation and generic agreement on not allowing the aforesaid proliferation. But that doesn't apply to other explosives, even if you are equally dead by a bullet than by a H-bomb. So what is now a cutting-edge technology (nnICBMs), will in ten years perhaps be available to mostly anybody in the world, and there is no non-proliferation treaty to pursue anybody for it.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
I would say that it would be sufficient to ship the warhead in a container and then detonate it when it arrives at the right port.
A decent sized hydrogen bomb in a container would be able to cause some mess.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Yeah, because we all know diplomacy works with raving lunatics like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, Ahmedinejad...
I supposed the U.N. could have just sat down and had a cup of tea with the bad guys to stop genocides in Darfur, Rwanda, Tibet.
> Yeah, war is bad, but why not take economic advantage / only take economic disadvantage from it?
It's called ethics, and I know for a fact that not all swedes lack that trait.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
The concern isn't that they're weapons as such, but that they're weapons designed to be hidden on merchant vessels. In a tense situation, it would likely make all merchant ships potential threats and would likely end up with a lot of innocent civilians being killed.
> Why should they not sell them?
One word: Stinger.
It might sound like a nice payday but these things might end up pointed at YOU.
Nevermind the rest of the world, the Russians should be considering their own expanding frontiers here.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Against whom? If Al-Queda let of a bomb in New York harbor who would you nuke? Saudi? Afghanistan?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
>Apparently you're uniformed, anti-US, or outright stupid. As you're a European I'll vote "anti-US".
Nope. While I find the US political activity (= warfare) idiotic, I consider the EU politicians to be just as moronic, so I'm not anti-US per se. After all, I did live there for a couple of years, and the people themselves are usually rather friendly.
Seeing that I have excellent genes (50% of my extended family are doctors, the others scientists, with merely one manager) and a high-level job, I dare to believe that my intelligence is at least average - certainly not "outright stupid" ;)
Uninformed, however, is always a possibility.
I see your only argument here is against me saying that anti-missile tests usually failed. You claim that this is not the case with SM-3s, which have a hit-probability of around 80%. Now this 80% is the best test record from the marine - which is known for faking quite a few tests, and simplifying a lot of other tests.
I'd think that a no-warnings test would have a hit percentage of around 50% - pretty darn good for taking down a missile, but certainly not enough (even 80% would be too low). Missiles are rather cheap, compared to aircraft carriers...
If I misunderstood you, I do apologize. Your message seems a little, hm, off-the-cuff, and I am more used to argue with people giving me useful data.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
Who ever said the target was a military base. Nuking the trade ports with a nuke in a container would be easy to do and very devastating to the country who now has one less port. With careful timing (and container ships are very coordinated) they could hit more then one port at the same time. Effectively stopping the flow of goods in and out of said country for a while.
Doesn't concealing weapons in civilian areas violate several international conventions and treaties? The only market for this device is terror based organizations.
It also makes aggression by big fat bullies less likely (think USA).
This is analogous to having civilians having concealed weapons. With concealed carry laws in Texas, violent crime has dropped significantly, even as it rises in other populous nations. With a weapon like this, wars are much less likely to break out.
This is sort of like a poor-man's nuke. No nuclear armed nation has ever been invaded (and only one has had a possession invaded--England). Maybe this sort of thing will stop us from invading any more countries using hair-brained justifications.
The fact that F-111s were used against Libya doesn't mean naval aircraft would have proven ineffective. What it does prove is F-111s carry a lot more bombs a much longer distance than carrier aircraft, which isn't exactly earth-shattering.
Because all R&D and military planning stopped in the 80's.
You, and TFA, were specifically talking about CVNs and their surrounding battle group, not all ships. A fishing vessel indeed has no chance, but that's not what you were just talking about.
Intercepting an ICBM (~Mach 20) is a tad more difficult than intercepting even the fastest anti-ship missile (~Mach 4). There's all sorts of tests where that was done successfully, but since that's not as embarrassing as you'd like.
Not if you want to kill a carrier. The range on normal shipping radar isn't terribly long, since you only need it for navigation. You are not going to get your disguised cargo vessel that close to a carrier.