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Russia Unveils 'Satan 2' Missile Powerful Enough To 'Wipe Out UK, France Or Texas' (telegraph.co.uk)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Telegraph: Russia has released the first image of its new nuclear missile, a weapon so powerful that it could wipe out nearly all of the United Kingdom or France. The RS-28 Sarmat thermonuclear-armed ballistic missile was commissioned in 2011 and is expected to come into service in 2018. The first images of the massive missile were declassified on Sunday and have now been published for the first time. It has been dubbed "Satan 2," as it will replace the RS-36M, the 1970s-era weapon referred to by Nato as the Satan missile. Sputnik, the Russian government-controlled news agency, reported in May that the missile could destroy an area "the size of Texas or France." Russian media report that the missile will weigh up to 10 tons with the capacity to carry up to 10 tons of nuclear cargo. With that type of payload, it could deliver a blast some 2,000 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Russia reportedly tested a hypersonic warhead in April that is apparently intended for use on the Satan 2 missiles. The warhead is designed to be impossible to intercept because it does not move on a set trajectory.

20 of 1,028 comments (clear)

  1. Tzar Bomba by Mr_Blank · · Score: 4, Informative

    That is a big firecracker, but it is no Tsar Bomba. The Tsar Bomba was tested in 1961, so the technological capability for high yield bombs is old news. Best bit about the Tsar Bomba: "In theory, the bomb had a maximum yield of 100 megatons if it were to have included a U-238 tamper, but because only one bomb was built, this theory was never demonstrated."

    Here is a short documentary film on the Tsar Bomba.

    1. Re:Tzar Bomba by hey! · · Score: 3, Informative

      Actually... This thing can potentially deliver up to 15 separate warheads, which could in aggregate sum up to 50 MT, which coincidentally was the approximate yield of the Tsar Bomba. However those warheads would have immensely more destructive capacity than the Tsar Bomba.

      The reason is simple geometry: the energy of an explosion is dissipated in three dimension, but people live on an approximately two dimensional surface; all that energy which goes down and up is wasted. To do more destruction, you need to find a way of distributing the energy of the attack across the surface of the Earth, which can easily be done by delivering two warheads of half the size, or even better ten warheads of 1/10 the size.

      This is what is behind the whole "area the size of France" thing. You couldn't do that with a single massive bomb, but ten smaller bombs might do the trick. Also note that terrain makes a difference -- as it did in the Nagasaki bombing, which missed its mark, causing the blast to be contained by the Urakami Valley. Southern France is extremely rugged, so it is unlikely that all of France could be destroyed by one of these things; however, there's no question that France as a country would be destroyed.

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      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  2. Hope someone in the US government remembered... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    ...to let Russia in on the fact that all this fearmongering and dick-waving they've been doing lately is just part of their scheme to do everything in their power to distract people from wikileaks, keep Trump out of office, and preserve their ultra-lucrative oligarchy.

  3. Re:No, they didn't. by mbkennel · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually most of the fallout comes from the fission products themselves. Modern nukes like a 300kT warhead from a MIRV are 2/3rds fission, mostly in the secondary. So the amount of radionuclides is almost proportional to yield and about the same between airburst and groundburst and it is a large.

    It would be more widely dispersed in the air however, and perhaps that's the difference.

  4. Re:Hmm by bucket_brigade · · Score: 2, Informative

    How are Sweden and Germany destroyed pray do tell. Both are doing much better than Russia.

  5. Summary picked the wrong article to copy by Cytotoxic · · Score: 5, Informative

    The Telegraph article got the details wrong. Check out the RT version instead.

    It is a 100+ ton missile that can carry about 10 tons of payload. They are also designing a new warhead that is maneuverable in order to avoid anti-missile defenses. They are claiming that it can hold 10 heavy warheads or 16 light warheads and/or a combination of warheads and decoys/countermeasures.

    The whole "destroy an area the size of France or Texas isn't clear, but this is a missile announcement, not a warhead announcement, so they are probably talking about the area which could be covered in a single launch. I.E. one spread of warheads from a single launch could theoretically hit Paris, Barcelona and Milan. That would be pretty hard for anti-missile defenses to deal with.

  6. Re:Hmm by FyRE666 · · Score: 2, Informative

    "Why do they get a free pass to act like they are lead by a KGB thug?"

    Because they ARE lead by a KGB thug?

  7. Re:No, they didn't. by cirby · · Score: 5, Informative

    The thing about a modern fission-fusion device is that the fusion neutrons help "burn up" a lot of the primary. They've supposedly moved away from the heavy uranium tampers of the early weapons to help reduce fallout (while losing some efficiency), or have fine-tuned them so much that they're effectively being burned up completely in the detonation.

    As you mention, part of it's that the fallout that's left disperses over a very, very wide area.

  8. Re: Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yup it was touch and go whether america would join at all. Just had to wait until the old world powers had bankrupted themselves and destroyed their industry. It all worked out very nicely for the new world order.

  9. Re:BULLSHIT US saved Russia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Both the Russian historian Boris Sokolov and none other than Josef Stalin disagree with you. From the Wikipedia page about Lend-Lease:

      [Emphasis is mine]

    According to the Russian historian Boris Vadimovich Sokolov, Lend-Lease played a crucial role in winning the war:

            On the whole the following conclusion can be drawn: that without these Western shipments under Lend-Lease the Soviet Union not only would not have been able to win the Great Patriotic War, it would not have been able even to oppose the German invaders, since it could not itself produce sufficient quantities of arms and military equipment or adequate supplies of fuel and ammunition. The Soviet authorities were well aware of this dependency on Lend-Lease. Thus, Stalin told Harry Hopkins [FDR’s emissary to Moscow in July 1941] that the U.S.S.R. could not match Germany’s might as an occupier of Europe and its resources.[24]

    Nikita Khrushchev, having served as a military commissar and intermediary between Stalin and his generals during the war, addressed directly the significance of Lend-lease aid in his memoirs:

            I would like to express my candid opinion about Stalin’s views on whether the Red Army and the Soviet Union could have coped with Nazi Germany and survived the war without aid from the United States and Britain. First, I would like to tell about some remarks Stalin made and repeated several times when we were “discussing freely” among ourselves. He stated bluntly that if the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war. If we had had to fight Nazi Germany one on one, we could not have stood up against Germany’s pressure, and we would have lost the war. No one ever discussed this subject officially, and I don’t think Stalin left any written evidence of his opinion, but I will state here that several times in conversations with me he noted that these were the actual circumstances. He never made a special point of holding a conversation on the subject, but when we were engaged in some kind of relaxed conversation, going over international questions of the past and present, and when we would return to the subject of the path we had traveled during the war, that is what he said. When I listened to his remarks, I was fully in agreement with him, and today I am even more so. [30]

  10. Re:Feeding the trolls by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Eh, I guess. I'm not voting for him, but even his main critique "Mexicans are rapists" - it's clear to anyone with half a brain he wasn't saying literally 100% of Mexicans illegally crossing the border are rapists. And yet it's stuck around to this day.

    Massive headline about his campaign manager savagely attacking a woman reporter ? Stuck around for weeks ? Completely false.

    I could go on - I don't think there's a conspiracy, I don't think he's fit for presidency - but it's obvious the left does not represent the truth most of the time and are just "in it to win it".

  11. Re: Hmm by MachineShedFred · · Score: 4, Informative

    Manufactured in Israel. If it's an Intel CPU, it was designed in Hillsboro, Oregon, USA (unless it's an ancient Pentium-M). And the fabrication process and fab plant layout was also designed and tested in Hillsboro, Oregon, USA at Intel's D1X facility, as that is exactly what that facility is for - perfecting the fab design for the next node shrink. Just like the D1C and D1D facilities right next to it, which have been converted into manufacturing fabs.

    Oh, and if the grandparent poster has an iPhone, the CPU was designed by Apple, in California, USA. The CPU would have been manufactured either by Samsung or TSMC, and not in the US.

    --
    Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
  12. Re: Hmm by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you're running a current generation Intel CPU, then its silicon was fabricated in either Chandler, Arizona, USA or Hillsboro, Oregon, USA. There are no other semiconductor fabrication plants in the world capable of creating wafers with 10nm lithography.

    It would have been designed in Santa Clara, California, USA, which is where Intel's engineers reside.

    As for your product code, that tells where it was packaged (and no, I don't mean sticking it in a retail box.) Wherever that CPU is packaged is where it is officially "made" for tax/tariff/embargo considerations, but in reality very little of the production happens in that location.

  13. Re: Hmm by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 4, Informative

    The internet was NOT British invented, the web was. And you're uneducated if you think the two words are even remotely interchangeable.

  14. Re: Hmm by arth1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    So the Marshall Plan fucked up Europe then?

    In some ways, yes, both because of the highly uneven distribution (Spain got nothing), and because how it was distributed, with agreements requiring recipients to also buy from the US, creating long term dependencies, and only being given to recipients who could afford to pay the subsidized prices to their local governments. I.e. the poorest did not benefit, and it caused a greater distance between rich and poor.

    The Lend-Lease agreement during the war was worse, where it ended up being European countries lending equipment and personnel to the US, but the US would lease personnel and equipment to European countries. Some countries were still paying the US for that up into the early 2000s.

  15. Re:welcome america to MATH 101 by SvnLyrBrto · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, it wouldn't. Nuclear weapons may be the most destructive thing we know how to build. But they're not black magic. And witless alarmism does no one any good. A 400MT nuke airbursted over Paris at the optimum height would pretty well wipe out it, its suburbs, and quite a lot of the surrounding countryside. But the majority of France would survive. and the UK would be untouched:

    http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nuke...

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    Imagine all the people...
  16. Re:Hmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    How many countries has Russia invaded for profit or global politics and how many did the USA?

    In the history of the Russian Federation, which is less than 30 years old, we have seen the Russian military involved in the following conflicts:

    • War in Abkhazia (1992–93). Chewed off a chunk of Georgia.
    • Transnistria War (1992). Chewed off a chunk of Moldova.
    • Tajikistani Civil War (1992 - 1997).
    • Russo-Georgian War (2008). I think they chewed off another chunk of Georgia in this.
    • Ukraine (2014-ongoing). Currently a chunk of Ukraine is now part of Russia.
    • Syria (2015-ongoing).

    I left out the Russian military conflicts that were contained within Russian borders, for example the Second Chechnyan War between 1999 and 2009.

  17. Re: Hmm by rickb928 · · Score: 5, Informative

    No, Hitler merely repeated Napoleon's error, and ultimately met the same fate.

    The Americans etc.destroyed much German war capability, driving them back to Berlin. The Russians sapped the Nazis' eastern front and with just a little material help from the Americans counterattacked and pincered the Nazis. Had the Americans slowed we would have seen the Soviet empire established with a western border on France and maybe Belgium. whether that would have been better or not I would leave to your imagination.

    We could debate the potential success of the Allies if Russia had not counterattacked, but I'm thinking that Hitler's greatest weakness was believing he was a military strategist. Killing Nazi generals was the best Allied strategy, leaving him with successively junior and weaker staff, less likely to speak up and challenge his worst ideas. But any significant delay in defeating Nazi Germany could have resulted in a nuclear weapon being detonated either on the Continent or on Britain, and we would have a very, very different world than we do now. Japan was so isolated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were considered events 'somewhere else' by most of the world, and underappreciated for the gravity and potential except for the US and Russian leadership, who entirely understood that any singular advantage in nuclear weapons could result in worldwide destruction or hegemony, with no middle ground.

    Thank your luck stars that the US held the early advantage. The Soviet Empire would not have hesitated to use such leverage to brutal effect, and that would be a different world also. The US had very different aspirations for world influence, and that made a difference to the relative benefit of the world.

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    deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
  18. Re: Hmm by MightyMartian · · Score: 1, Informative

    You mean he didn't say he grabbed women's genitals? You mean he didn't praise Putin?

    As Alec Baldwin's Trump said, "The media is biased against me because they report what I say and what I do."

    The fact is that the only reason Trump is where he is is because of tens of millions of dollars of free advertising. Even now, as it becomes clearer and clearer his bid is doomed, you still see news outlets talking as if he had a hope in hell, invoking the silliness of the past, like "skewed polls" and legions of "shy Trump voters", trying to create the impression that he still represents a threat to Clinton.

    Meanwhile, on the ground, he still doesn't have a ground game, less than two weeks before votes are cast, and Hillary is so confident that she's not even really battling him any more, and is turning her attention to taking Congress.

    And let me guess, when the inevitable happens and he crashes and burns, you snivel and whine about how the "press is biased" or invoke some moronic claim of rigged elections.

    --
    The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
  19. Re:welcome america to MATH 101 by orgelspieler · · Score: 3, Informative
    No it wouldn't.

    punch in 400000 (kt) in the yield box, and see what happens. Yeah it's big, but not as big as Texas. That would take something about 100 times the size of tsar bomba. I don't even know if that's theoretically possible.