Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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:
I left out the Russian military conflicts that were contained within Russian borders, for example the Second Chechnyan War between 1999 and 2009.
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.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.