[LINK] New Russian nuclear missile

[Stephen Loosley]

Russia unveils massive new Satan 2 ICBM nuclear missiles

By Loz Blain  October 26th, 201
http://newatlas.com/rs28-sarmat-satan-2-russian-icbm/46127/


Russian President Vladimir Putin today announced a new intercontinental ballistic missile, the RS-28 Sarmat.

The new weapon has some truly extraordinary capabilities that make it well worthy of its NATO nickname: Satan 2.

Weighing in at over 100 tons, the RS-28 will be a silo-launched missile, with an extreme range capability. It's designed to be able to fly around the North or South poles, to attack targets from unexpected directions. It has a maximum range of around 10,000 kilometers.

It's not slow, either, maxing out at more than Mach 20, or some  24,500  km/h. That's about seven times faster than the SR-71 Blackbird ever went.

Its payload capacity is an enormous 10 tons, allowing it to carry up to 10 heavy warheads at one time, or a massive amount of missile defense countermeasures to help stop it getting shot down by anti-missile systems. 

In theory, according to Russia's Sputnik magazine, it could pack enough of a nuclear punch to destroy a land mass the size of Texas, or France, in one hit.

Satan 2 has been specifically designed to penetrate North American missile defense systems. According to Russian officials, it has been developed as a direct response to the USA's Prompt Global Strike system, which gives America the ability to deploy non-nuclear missile strikes anywhere on the planet within one hour.

The RS-28 project has been in the pipeline since contracts between the Russian government and the Makeyev Rocket Design bureau were signed in 2011. Originally expected to debut in 2020, timelines have been moved up to a 2018 deployment, and some sources are saying Russia expects the Satan 2 to constitute nearly all of Russia's land-based nuclear arsenal as soon as 2021.

Behind the bizarro-world dog and pony show of the 2016 US elections there seems to be a very real sense that the world's two largest nuclear superpowers are getting ready to butt heads in a big way over a number of geopolitical hotspots - Syria being the biggest of the bunch.

Here's hoping common sense prevails, and any new era of nuclear brinksmanship ends the way the last one did – with a whimper, not a bang. 

And certainly not a bang the size of Texas.


Cheers,
Stephen