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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.
At least, they certainly didn't make a missile with that kind of damage potential.
While it could throw a single 40 megaton warhead, it would more likely carry a handful of weapons topping out at about 50 megatons, total. Maybe.
Which is a lot, but nowhere near big enough to "wipe out" a medium-sized country like France.
They could pretty much destroy up to 15 separate cities with 300 kiloton airbursts (if the MIRV systems gives them that much spread and control, which it probably doesn't), but everything in between would be effectively untouched, and with a single weapon, most of Paris itself would only be lightly to moderately damaged. Modern high-efficiency weapons don't drop a lot of fallout in air burst mode, so that's not a consideration.
If they used ground burst targeting, they could cause a lot of downwind fallout, but it would leave large areas untouched upwind.
Forty to fifty megatons sounds like a lot, but when you compare it with how big the world is...
Remind me, why are we picking a fight with Russia again?
Because having Russia dominate the world would be horrific?
Because a world dominated by the US is all peaches and cream?
Because Russians remember the 20+ million they lost in WW2 and are never going to let 1941 happen again. They are justifiably paranoid. That's what Westerners do not get about the Russian national psyche. They trust no one, especially the US.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
In comparison, yes.
Good thing comparisons don't change the fact that most of the world hates the USA and Russia equally, and don't excuse either being such assholes.
Theres a big difference between "helping" and "saving". Russia contribute man power and equipment like tanks that the west has no concept of. For example there were literally 10x more Russian armies when Germany surrended. The truth is Russia WON ww2 by blood and guts.
Please dont tell me bullshit about LL. LL was arranged in late 41, just a few months later Russia won the biggest fight in history, involving about 4 -5 million soldiers - the battle of Stalingrad. That was the start of the end of the NAZIS. Befor eyou jump... theres no way anythign got thru to Russia by the time of Stalingrad.
Stop you hubris. America would not have landed in Europe without the UK as well, just like the UK would have had serious problems without its friends like Canada and the rest of Empire helping it from day one.
Why would humans create a weapon like that? :(
Nobody in their right state of mind wants it to be used.
If it is ever used, it could mean the end of the world is nigh.
Why would anyone invest the resources in developing such a weapon?
Fuck the Russians, and the Americans, and the defense departments, and the technicians and engineers willing to take on such a job, and the generals and presidents commissioning such a thing. You are all assholes.
You are an idiot if you think "that safe and technology loaded western lifestyle" has even meaning in the vast majority of the World.
America, as any dominating nation, fucks up the World to protect its interests. Don't be naive as to think America is doing everyone a favor or something like that.
Because they want to remain a sovereign nation going their own way
Which is why Russia is invading Ukraine and supporting terrorists when Ukraine wanted to go their own way and have closer trade relations with the West, right? Because the sovereign nation of Ukraine didn't want to live under the thumb of Russia any longer.
Why the fuck the rest of the European leaders don't go the same way as Russia I have no fucking clue.
Because people don't want to live under a dictatorship where the guy at the top can steal your business on a whim and hand it over to one of his oligarch friends.
Nor do they want to live in a place where the dictator decides who can and cannot run for political office and where, if you become too popular with the people or reveal the corruption endemic in his rule, he'll have you killed.
If you can't see the obvious, you might be a Russian troll.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
All of which was built in China / Korea ^.^
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
If you want your voice heard, you should probably vote for the person who you align with best.
Or to put it another way, you wouldn't tell a Trump voter in Massachusetts not to vote. Trump has a zero percent chance of winning in Massachusetts, but millions will still vote for him even though their vote is "wasted". You can say the same thing about Hillary voters in much of the south. Their candidate can't win in their state, but they'll still go out to the polls and make their voice heard.
The two-party lock-in is pure rhetorical garbage. I can't in good conscience vote for a completely unqualified demagogue or someone who is the closest thing to a living embodiment of the establishment.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The web was invented by tim berniers lee, a brit working in cern, a european city.
"I don't personally know a single Trump voter who isn't a racist or a sexist."
So let's see if I've got this right. You don't know any Trump voters? Somebody I work with summed it up nicely. I'm going to vote Trump, I'm not thrilled about it, I'm not proud about it, I'm not going to broadcast it to the world, but for as bad as he is, he's a damn sight better than Clinton.
And I've been thinking about it. Who you view worse depends on your view of political correctness and corruption. If you think political correctness is important (view being unoffensive and standing up for social causes as the height of importance) and you may not be thrilled about corruption but will deal with it, you support Clinton. If you're sort of sick of the PC agenda being shoved down your throat but are incredibly pissed off about corruption in politics, you support Trump. And I know you're going to try to point out how corrupt Trump is with his business deals, but remember, corruption requires political power, and as much as you may not like how he does business deals, he's never held political office so has never been in a position to demonstrate corruption. And Clinton....well, when the FBI said she shouldn't be charged on a gross negligence charge because she didn't intend to commit gross negligence, well, those of us who can't stand corruption were just left with our jaws dropped unable to believe just how far the corruption went.
They did send in their military, that's who the "Little Green Men" were. Even Putin has publicly admitted this. The "vote" was held under occupation, not internationally recognized, boycotted by significant segments of the population, and even Russia at one point accidentally released the "real" numbers from the vote which didn't match the official ones.
Do recall that Russia is a country where Chechnya "voted for" United Russia (Putin's Party) 99% in 2001. Some parts of Grozny voted for "The Butcher of Grozny" by well over 100%. You seriously think that's legit?
Amazing how many apologists for Russia there are here. False equivalencies are clearly alive and well.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
You're talking like Putin isn't the madman.
Note: I don't think he's a madman - he's too smart to actually go down the road to a full-on military engagement against NATO. I do, however, think he is beating the nationalist drum in order to bring back the glory days of the USSR that everyone seems to remember without also remembering the crushing human rights violations, the starvation and bread lines, and the ever-looming threat of nuclear oblivion between the Soviets and the West.
For the millenials that have no idea what Soviet Russia was about: everything sounds nice and rosy until you find yourself being forced into being a farmer because that's what some bureaucrat designated you as. Don't like it? Better not say anything about it, or you're off to a gulag in the next purge.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
If your tiny little syphilitic Eurobrains can't handle that, by all means keep using your soft, pussy-ass metric system.
It is pretty much this unlikely combination of arrogance and ignorance that much of the rest of the world considers "uniquely American".
Also, doing the right thing -- for the wrong reasons, after having tried everything else.
It seems to me that the old-fashioned communists in Russia [and their modern day descendants] were much worse towards their population that towards foreigners
except for Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria.. and every other country that they were able to occupy.
I don't know what kind of world revisionist history you've been smoking but if you can't tell the difference between what happened in western and eastern Europe after WW2 then there is no reason to discuss anything. No one can argue with that kind of crazy.
once more into the breach