April 18, 2018
Vlad Unveils the Death Star
By J.R. Dunn
It's always interesting when two apparently unrelated elements of the political world collide to shed light on a third, also seemingly unrelated element. That's what happened last weekend during the missile strikes against Assad's nerve-gas network.
For the past several months, speculation has been rampant in political and military circles concerning new superweapons developed by the Russian Federation, presumably for use against its Main Enemy, the U.S.
Information on these systems did not emerge by accident or by means of intelligence efforts. It was intentionally released by the Russians themselves, for purposes that would not be immediately evident to anyone unfamiliar with recent Russian (which is to say "Soviet") history.
On March 1st, Vladimir Putin, in a fiery address leading up to the March 18th presidential election, unveiled what he claimed to be a "nuclear-powered cruise missile" capable of staying in the air indefinitely and eluding any form of interception. The announcement was accompanied by footage purporting to show a test of the missile, along with animation of how it could dodge anti-missile defenses. (It's difficult to grasp what these "defenses" are supposed to consist of – in the video, they appear to be balloons popping up out of nowhere in the middle of the Atlantic.)
At the same time, Putin also "announced" (it had "accidently" been revealed earlier in a Russian military documentary) an independently-guided nuclear-armed torpedo drone that could spend months underwater before setting off a 100-megaton warhead in the waters off a port city. The city would then be inundated by a radioactive tsunami that would destroy everything to the suburbs and beyond.
Obviously, a pair of weapons to make Dr. Strangelove get up and dance around the war room. (Putin also announced several other more conventional weapons.) The torpedo is known as either "Status 6" or "Kanyon," depending on the source. The cruise missile as yet has no name – Putin jovially proposed that viewers send in their suggestions.
Students of nuclear weaponry immediately recognized this pair as reboots of American concepts from the 1950s. A USAF nuclear-powered cruise missile program, variously known as Project Pluto or SLAM (Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile) was carried out from 1957 to 1964. Pluto was a design for a ramjet cruise missile powered by a 500-megawatt nuclear reactor with a range of up to 113,000 miles and a cruising speed of Mach 3 to 4.5 (2300 mph to 3450 mph). Pluto was to be a gigantic weapon, carrying up to several dozen H-bombs. After these were expended, it would roar across Russia at low altitude, its supersonic shock wave knocking down anything that remained, at the same time spewing out a highly radioactive exhaust.
After several successful reactor tests, Pluto was canceled in July 1964 because it was a stupid idea. Any such weapon would show up in the area of operations hours after matters had already been decided, its only role to make the rubble bounce. Not even the contemporary Lord of the Nukes Gen. Curtis E. LeMay was interested in any such system.
Status 6, on the other hand, is a cut-rate version of the "gigaton mine," which was dreamed up by J. Robert Oppenheimer in the early 1950s while he was trying to scare people out of making H-bombs. Gigaton mines were thousand-megaton nuclear devices (one billion in the U.S. system) which would be triggered either on coastlines, where they would cause the aforementioned tsunamis, or alternately in low earth orbit, where they could sterilize a continent from coast to coast.
Any temptation to build these things was curtailed by the fiascos of the Castle Bravo (3/1/54) and Tsar Bomba (10/30/61) nuclear tests, in which design errors led to far greater yields than anticipated. The terrifying results discouraged efforts toward designing larger bombs and led eventually to the Atmospheric Test-Ban Treaty of 1963. Today nuclear weapons tend to be precision-guided low-yield devices that can be tuned to match a target.
Regardless of their secondhand status, Putin's revelations led to the traditional weapons panic – shrieking in the media, nervous press conferences from the military, and arm-waving from the nuclear "experts"–all this despite the fact that it's unlikely that they actually exist.
The cruise missile video? There are a number of problems with that little number:
Vlad Unveils the Death Star
By J.R. Dunn
It's always interesting when two apparently unrelated elements of the political world collide to shed light on a third, also seemingly unrelated element. That's what happened last weekend during the missile strikes against Assad's nerve-gas network.
For the past several months, speculation has been rampant in political and military circles concerning new superweapons developed by the Russian Federation, presumably for use against its Main Enemy, the U.S.
Information on these systems did not emerge by accident or by means of intelligence efforts. It was intentionally released by the Russians themselves, for purposes that would not be immediately evident to anyone unfamiliar with recent Russian (which is to say "Soviet") history.
On March 1st, Vladimir Putin, in a fiery address leading up to the March 18th presidential election, unveiled what he claimed to be a "nuclear-powered cruise missile" capable of staying in the air indefinitely and eluding any form of interception. The announcement was accompanied by footage purporting to show a test of the missile, along with animation of how it could dodge anti-missile defenses. (It's difficult to grasp what these "defenses" are supposed to consist of – in the video, they appear to be balloons popping up out of nowhere in the middle of the Atlantic.)
At the same time, Putin also "announced" (it had "accidently" been revealed earlier in a Russian military documentary) an independently-guided nuclear-armed torpedo drone that could spend months underwater before setting off a 100-megaton warhead in the waters off a port city. The city would then be inundated by a radioactive tsunami that would destroy everything to the suburbs and beyond.
Obviously, a pair of weapons to make Dr. Strangelove get up and dance around the war room. (Putin also announced several other more conventional weapons.) The torpedo is known as either "Status 6" or "Kanyon," depending on the source. The cruise missile as yet has no name – Putin jovially proposed that viewers send in their suggestions.
Students of nuclear weaponry immediately recognized this pair as reboots of American concepts from the 1950s. A USAF nuclear-powered cruise missile program, variously known as Project Pluto or SLAM (Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile) was carried out from 1957 to 1964. Pluto was a design for a ramjet cruise missile powered by a 500-megawatt nuclear reactor with a range of up to 113,000 miles and a cruising speed of Mach 3 to 4.5 (2300 mph to 3450 mph). Pluto was to be a gigantic weapon, carrying up to several dozen H-bombs. After these were expended, it would roar across Russia at low altitude, its supersonic shock wave knocking down anything that remained, at the same time spewing out a highly radioactive exhaust.
After several successful reactor tests, Pluto was canceled in July 1964 because it was a stupid idea. Any such weapon would show up in the area of operations hours after matters had already been decided, its only role to make the rubble bounce. Not even the contemporary Lord of the Nukes Gen. Curtis E. LeMay was interested in any such system.
Status 6, on the other hand, is a cut-rate version of the "gigaton mine," which was dreamed up by J. Robert Oppenheimer in the early 1950s while he was trying to scare people out of making H-bombs. Gigaton mines were thousand-megaton nuclear devices (one billion in the U.S. system) which would be triggered either on coastlines, where they would cause the aforementioned tsunamis, or alternately in low earth orbit, where they could sterilize a continent from coast to coast.
Any temptation to build these things was curtailed by the fiascos of the Castle Bravo (3/1/54) and Tsar Bomba (10/30/61) nuclear tests, in which design errors led to far greater yields than anticipated. The terrifying results discouraged efforts toward designing larger bombs and led eventually to the Atmospheric Test-Ban Treaty of 1963. Today nuclear weapons tend to be precision-guided low-yield devices that can be tuned to match a target.
Regardless of their secondhand status, Putin's revelations led to the traditional weapons panic – shrieking in the media, nervous press conferences from the military, and arm-waving from the nuclear "experts"–all this despite the fact that it's unlikely that they actually exist.
The cruise missile video? There are a number of problems with that little number:
- Putin's nuclear cruise missile is externally indistinguishable from the KH-55 family of conventionally-powered missiles, also known by the NATO designation AS-15 Kent. The Kent is a small missile, ranging in size from 19 to 24 feet in length, with a weight of 3,600 to 5,300 lbs. – little more than a medium-sized truck. The missile shown in Putin's video is clearly about that size.
- One of the things that killed Pluto was that it was impossible to test. Two methods exist for operating nuclear-powered jet engines – direct and indirect fuel flow. In direct flow, the fuel runs straight into the reactor, where it is heated and blasted out the rear. Indirect flow features separate heat elements which heat up the fuel.
- The rest of the world carefully monitors the atmosphere for unexplained radiation. Yet nobody detected anything associated with this missile.
- There's also the fact that it can't be safely landed. A crash would result in a reactor explosion similar to what happened at Chernobyl, if on a smaller scale. (This falsifies the CIA claim that the first test resulted in a crash. No nuclear accident, no crash.) The Pluto designers planned to drop the missile deep into the Pacific, where it would sit on the bottom emitting radioactivity for the next 20,000 years. Are the Russians admitting to a world-class environmental crime?
- Putin's nice movie shows the chase plane flying a few hundred yards behind the missile, where at any moment, a quick turn or sudden blast of wind could bathe the plane in radioactive exhaust.
- Finally, only a few establishing shots (like the one above) actually show the missile in flight. The rest is animation. Did the Russian cameras run out of film or what?