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.

Comments

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember when Putin said that the defense systems installed in Poland and Romania will be useless because they are working on "something else"?

Re: Hmm

[ArmoredDragon]

Hell, without the Marshall Plan alone, I think Europe would be in one of three states right now:

- Annexed by Russia and presently in second world status, with the Iron Curtain still alive and well.
- Starting yet another world war, as if the first two weren't enough.
- Technologically even worse off than former Warsaw pact states are presently.

Re: Hmm

[Opportunist]

The Marshall Plan was a win-win-win situation. First, the US companies got rid of their overproduction after the war. Second, it was a good propaganda stunt to make the US look more appealing than the USSR. And finally it did actually help the destroyed countries because they had no infrastructure to build that crap themselves.

But, frankly, that last part was just the icing on the cake. Not the cake itself.

Where have we seen this before...

[hyades1]

A cynic might suspect Putin is trying to reverse the smoke and mirrors strategy epitomized by the Strategic Defense Initiative to trick the US into spending itself broke countering a non-existent threat.

Re:No, they didn't.

[Alioth]

"Wipe out" is indeed what it would do.

Let's imagine this is a MIRV with 15 separate warheads, totaling 50 megatons, total (maybe). Let's imagine the targets are the following British cities: London, Bristol, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinborough, with the larger ones receiving two warheads.

Britain would basically cease to exist as a nation. So much damage would be done the economy would be non-functional. All the transport links in the country flow through those now destroyed cities, and that infrastructure would be destroyed. Every single piece of modern electronics in the country and in neighbouring countries that was not EMP hardened would no longer work, and everything (especially the transportation system) depends on all this stuff working. The prevailing south west winds would ensure that enough fallout would end up on surrounding areas adding to the casualties, and areas with nearby nuclear power stations would receive a lot of extra fallout. Just feeding the survivors with a barely functioning transportation system would be a logistical nightmare - ground transportation would be difficult thanks most of the major road and rail routes having been destroyed. Injured survivors would be left to fend for themselves - the entire capacity of the health service would be overwhelmed with the casualties of just one of the bombs. The electricity grid would be destroyed, even to the undamaged areas, it would be years before power was restored.

The survivors themselves, many of them would be suffering PTSD in the years afterwards, and virtually everyone will have lost friends and family and probably most of what they own in the attacks. What survived wouldn't be Britain, it would be a grotesque almost zombie like Britain with at best third world conditions for decades following.

Just because there are survivors and some land left untouched doesn't mean the country is effectively destroyed.