I guess when you stop to think about it logically, it becomes apparent that it's simply a flawed (read: stupid) weapon. Russia has much better ways to end the world. But I guess they have to spend their petrodollars on something that grabs headlines. Doing the tedious work of modernizing their existing nuclear force just isn't sexy enough.
Presumably the main purpose is attempted intimidation, primarily of Western voting populations who by and large aren't terribly clued in on the actual limitations of all these white elephants and who these days tend to be rather poorly served by their media in such matters. (I think we can assume the actual decision-makers are decidedly better informed by their various analysts and experts.)
Plus rah-rah "Russia stronk" nationalist chestbeating for the home crowd ofc. It's not like his regime had for many years now had much else to offer them beside such Potemkin's Villages of supposed national greatness.
Might be a certain amount of the state apparatus just meekly trying its best to meet the whims of an increasingly out of touch and paranoid autocrat too, obviously. I rather doubt there have been people around Czar Vlad I the Terrible willing to tell him "boss that's probably not going to work..." for a good long time now.
On a quick read one of the purely military considerations behind the US military axing the SLAM concept back in the day was that Mach 3 or not cruise missiles are fundamentally susceptible to interception by even fairly conventional air defenses. This thing is by all accounts subsonic thus giving Everyone & Dog, Inc. that much more time to detect and track it and vector in interceptors - and between modern sensor tech and the pretty conspicuous heat profile of a nuclear ramjet or thermal rocket ID'ing one of these things shouldn't be particularly difficult.
Plus the somewhat onerous logistics of just prepping one for launch ought to make it relatively easy to keep an eye on the putative arsenal. You're not exactly going to be strapping these under planes or hiding mobile launch platforms in the woods waiting for the right time, are you?
...they did pick an actually pretty cool name for it, tho. (Burevestnik is Russian for storm petrel and more generally the tubenose family of seabirds - eg. albatrosses - which have for centuries been widely seen as omens of storms both literal and figurative.)
And in other news, Putin announced a nuclear pig just flew three times around the kremlin, clicked its heels and said “there’s no place like dome” and turned into victory in the SMO.
Do you think that thing is actually useful for anything besides killing Russian scientists and its own ground crews? Mostly propaganda? It doesn't seem very practical and it's fairly easy to detect with that IR plume from Hell. 🤔 I don't see any way to make it even remotely stealthy.
Very much propaganda, but the real danger is when the Russians blur the lines between using it as a symbol and actually believing in its utility. It's honestly another in a long line of "super weapons" that putin keeps investing in in his quest to be a Bond villain.
This reminds me of a little detail about the WW2 German "Wunderwaffen" I'm pretty sure most people are quite unaware of - namely, Hitler originally had no time for them and all such blue-sky research projects ran on shoestring budgets. IIRC the boffins had any number of sardonic jokes about it too.
This all changed around late '42 or thereabouts and suddenly all the avant-garde shit got priority. Why?
The great summer offensive in the south. Specifically its fundamental failure to achieve its critical goals, above all the capture of the Caspian oil fields. The German strategists basically did the arithmetic and bluntly told the big man that without those strategic gains *Germany was going to lose*, end of. (That by the end of the year they were staring in the face of the Stalingrad debacle, North Africa going horribly sideways and the Japanese starting to clearly lose ground in the Asia-Pacific theater certainly didn't help one bit.)
Fundamentally Hitler had painted himself into a corner he could no longer fight his way out of by conventional means, so for want of options (and perhaps somewhat influenced by his evident predisposition for high-stakes gambling) he went all in on the exotica in the vain hope some novel technological miracle could overturn the pitiless arithmetic of industrial total war. In practice the Germans then just conducted useful, expensive research for the eventual victors who in any case comfortably outpaced them in any number of fields that actually mattered...
Mutatis mutandis Putin seems to be treading much the same beaten path which I find rather ironic in some ways.
The 1958 movie The Lost Missile concerned a Pluto-like SLAM that files across the Arctic and into Canada at high Mach speed, destroying everything under its path. FWIW
It could essentially never land, at least, not on land. It would need to ditch at sea. Russia would consider these expendable, not reusable.
The easier engineering path is to boost it, switch on the reactor, let it fly until it hits the target (or fails), and accept that a crashed or expended vehicle will be a radioactive mess. That’s ugly, brutally inefficient, and politically toxic, which is exactly why the US shelved Project Pluto in the 1960s. Putin’s people can test prototypes, but committing to an operational, recoverable fleet creates a logistical and diplomatic nightmare.
If Russia wants a non-explosive recovery, the constraints are brutal: you have to stop the reactor, cool it, isolate the core, and move it through human-safe distances without shredding protective barriers. Materials, shielding, and remote handling gear must be world-class, and every step invites contamination risk.
It could likely be shot down without triggering the payload. But the reactor would scatter radiological material over a pretty sizable area. Plus you would get downwind contamination.
Let's not ignore the President's retort, essentially "we have something more destructive we haven't bragged about in public. Likely he's hinting at DEWs
I guess when you stop to think about it logically, it becomes apparent that it's simply a flawed (read: stupid) weapon. Russia has much better ways to end the world. But I guess they have to spend their petrodollars on something that grabs headlines. Doing the tedious work of modernizing their existing nuclear force just isn't sexy enough.
Presumably the main purpose is attempted intimidation, primarily of Western voting populations who by and large aren't terribly clued in on the actual limitations of all these white elephants and who these days tend to be rather poorly served by their media in such matters. (I think we can assume the actual decision-makers are decidedly better informed by their various analysts and experts.)
Plus rah-rah "Russia stronk" nationalist chestbeating for the home crowd ofc. It's not like his regime had for many years now had much else to offer them beside such Potemkin's Villages of supposed national greatness.
Might be a certain amount of the state apparatus just meekly trying its best to meet the whims of an increasingly out of touch and paranoid autocrat too, obviously. I rather doubt there have been people around Czar Vlad I the Terrible willing to tell him "boss that's probably not going to work..." for a good long time now.
On a quick read one of the purely military considerations behind the US military axing the SLAM concept back in the day was that Mach 3 or not cruise missiles are fundamentally susceptible to interception by even fairly conventional air defenses. This thing is by all accounts subsonic thus giving Everyone & Dog, Inc. that much more time to detect and track it and vector in interceptors - and between modern sensor tech and the pretty conspicuous heat profile of a nuclear ramjet or thermal rocket ID'ing one of these things shouldn't be particularly difficult.
Plus the somewhat onerous logistics of just prepping one for launch ought to make it relatively easy to keep an eye on the putative arsenal. You're not exactly going to be strapping these under planes or hiding mobile launch platforms in the woods waiting for the right time, are you?
...they did pick an actually pretty cool name for it, tho. (Burevestnik is Russian for storm petrel and more generally the tubenose family of seabirds - eg. albatrosses - which have for centuries been widely seen as omens of storms both literal and figurative.)
Awesome background. Thanks for the comment!
And in other news, Putin announced a nuclear pig just flew three times around the kremlin, clicked its heels and said “there’s no place like dome” and turned into victory in the SMO.
The problem with the gambit Putin's trying is that everyone knows it by now.
Very enlightening.
Do you think that thing is actually useful for anything besides killing Russian scientists and its own ground crews? Mostly propaganda? It doesn't seem very practical and it's fairly easy to detect with that IR plume from Hell. 🤔 I don't see any way to make it even remotely stealthy.
Very much propaganda, but the real danger is when the Russians blur the lines between using it as a symbol and actually believing in its utility. It's honestly another in a long line of "super weapons" that putin keeps investing in in his quest to be a Bond villain.
"One million dollars!" (Pinky in mouth)
This reminds me of a little detail about the WW2 German "Wunderwaffen" I'm pretty sure most people are quite unaware of - namely, Hitler originally had no time for them and all such blue-sky research projects ran on shoestring budgets. IIRC the boffins had any number of sardonic jokes about it too.
This all changed around late '42 or thereabouts and suddenly all the avant-garde shit got priority. Why?
The great summer offensive in the south. Specifically its fundamental failure to achieve its critical goals, above all the capture of the Caspian oil fields. The German strategists basically did the arithmetic and bluntly told the big man that without those strategic gains *Germany was going to lose*, end of. (That by the end of the year they were staring in the face of the Stalingrad debacle, North Africa going horribly sideways and the Japanese starting to clearly lose ground in the Asia-Pacific theater certainly didn't help one bit.)
Fundamentally Hitler had painted himself into a corner he could no longer fight his way out of by conventional means, so for want of options (and perhaps somewhat influenced by his evident predisposition for high-stakes gambling) he went all in on the exotica in the vain hope some novel technological miracle could overturn the pitiless arithmetic of industrial total war. In practice the Germans then just conducted useful, expensive research for the eventual victors who in any case comfortably outpaced them in any number of fields that actually mattered...
Mutatis mutandis Putin seems to be treading much the same beaten path which I find rather ironic in some ways.
The 1958 movie The Lost Missile concerned a Pluto-like SLAM that files across the Arctic and into Canada at high Mach speed, destroying everything under its path. FWIW
This is more a Friday afternoon before a long weekend kind of post..
how can bring it down without it exploding etc. ?
It could essentially never land, at least, not on land. It would need to ditch at sea. Russia would consider these expendable, not reusable.
The easier engineering path is to boost it, switch on the reactor, let it fly until it hits the target (or fails), and accept that a crashed or expended vehicle will be a radioactive mess. That’s ugly, brutally inefficient, and politically toxic, which is exactly why the US shelved Project Pluto in the 1960s. Putin’s people can test prototypes, but committing to an operational, recoverable fleet creates a logistical and diplomatic nightmare.
If Russia wants a non-explosive recovery, the constraints are brutal: you have to stop the reactor, cool it, isolate the core, and move it through human-safe distances without shredding protective barriers. Materials, shielding, and remote handling gear must be world-class, and every step invites contamination risk.
and neutralisation by non-Russians?
It could likely be shot down without triggering the payload. But the reactor would scatter radiological material over a pretty sizable area. Plus you would get downwind contamination.
Where did the 'successful' test conclude exactly?
"Nuclear weapons" are a hoax. All of them.
America has done this before. There is a reason why we don't have this type of missile in our own arsenal.
Very much appreciate the detail as always Wes, thank you 👍
Let's not ignore the President's retort, essentially "we have something more destructive we haven't bragged about in public. Likely he's hinting at DEWs
This was an excellent post. I would have to agree it was not made to be fired it was made to create uncertainly.
Well congratulations Russia. Honestly I think Putin if pushed or threatened would absolutely use this weapon.(assuming a working one exists)