Since the first Russian atomic bomb was detonated in 1949 – a surprise to the Americans who thought it as long as another five or more years away, Russia has been obsessed with nuclear weapons.
They are ingrained into the military thinking of the armed forces and political leaders have obsessed over them decade in, decade out. There’s a simple reason for it being this way; they can prove they have more, bigger and better weapons than their opponents, and that made up for the technological weakness, in almost every other area, that the United States and its allies had as their advantage in the conventional field.
The basic excuse is the same today. An economically weak autocracy, facing up to the realities of its conventional and industrial limitations, its over reliance on its energy exports, still uses the fact it can make some sort of fearsome nuclear weapon and we should all be shaking in our boots because of it. They find it incredibly difficult to understand why we’re not. Yet the answer is simple enough.
What we possess as a means of retaliation is more than sufficient to eradicate the Moscow & St.Petersburg regions and with it 80% of the Russian population and industrial capabilities. Just as they can easily do the same with the onerously expensive arsenal of ICBM’s and SLBM’s they have at their disposal. It’s an end of the world result, from which nobody really wins and the planet and humanity most definitely lose.
Yet still they persist in spending shocking amounts of money to build a nuclear powered flying cruise missile with a range of 14,000km (8,000 miles), carrying some megaton range warhead. Dubbed the ‘flying Chernobyl’, because if it crashes (and the first one did a few years ago), the contamination from the atomic power unit would be spread for miles in every direction and require a massive cleanup. The Burevestnik cruise missile is a joke the Russians are playing on themselves. When Putin sits there gloating about it and saying there’s nothing else like it anywhere, what he doesn’t mention is that’s because nobody else is stupid enough to want to build such a ludicrous weapon. It’s not going to get used, it has no value militarily, it has no deterrent value and adds nothing to the existing stockpile of nuclear warheads that makes any difference to anyone. What Russia already had was enough, it changes nothing. All they have done is prove that its possible to make a missile fly with a nuclear power plant – a concept dreamt up 70 years ago and dropped for the very reason this is still a bad idea – the risk of a peacetime crash and a radiological disaster.
The Burevestnik is one more example of the Russians and their obsession with going one step beyond when it comes to nuclear weaponry. The Czar Bomba was the first public demonstration of that excess back in 1961. A 54 megaton nuclear weapon detonated in the atmosphere above Novoya Zemlya in the Arctic so that the communist party leader Khrushchev could make a point, it was cut down from a design of around 100 megatons. Even at 54 it punched a hole 40 miles high into the atmosphere and the cloud base spread 65 miles in every direction. It blew glass out of windows 200 miles away and the shock wave went around the planet twice. The flash from the explosion was seen across Scandinavia and the Russian arctic. It in turn set off the United States on its final atmospheric nuclear testing round, Operation Dominic which ran through 1962. Then sense at last prevailed with the atmospheric test ban treaty.
Not happy with yet another nuclear novelty Putin’s all-image-and-no-substance regime came up with another. The equally pointless and ultimately more worrying Poseidon Torpedo. It’s not really a torpedo, it just looks like that because it’s the most practical way of operating an undersea drone with another atomic power plant, allegedly controlled by Ai. And they claim, a warhead as large as 40 megatons.
This thing with a range of 6 months – so its a globe trotter and could literally turn up anywhere off some coast, is designed to blow up in your harbor, or just out to sea so that it creates a Tsunami. I’m told that’s largely nonsense but the detonating in your main port, sending radioactive particulates from the seabed into the atmosphere would be especially dirty fallout wise, let alone the devastation of such a device.
And yet again why? What does it do that you could not do with an ICBM or SLBM, or even a nuclear armed sea launched cruise missile? The answer is not much at all, if anything. Yet again it adds nothing to deterrence, has little zero tactical application, and introduces some random Ai into the equation just to make you feel even less at peace with the moribund and ludicrous concept of the whole thing.
Poseidon makes the Burevestnik cruise missile look cheap. It’s taken a special ship to be built just to test the launch of the thing and recover them afterwards. It requires an entire submarine to be capable of firing it – the newly launched but far from complete Khabarovsk, a modified Borei Class SSBN.
Russia is like a Popeye state. It’s all talk and bravado until it eats a dose of its nuclear spinach, and only then is it a man of any note. Here in the West we sit and watch as Russia nuclear shadow boxes with itself, dumbfounded by their buffoonery, yet knowing full well that at anytime they could get serious. And if they did France and the UK have a response – as most certainly does America. And for as long as we do, these nuclear toys are just toys, absorbing vast amounts of Russian military funding that isn’t being used against Ukraine.
In the end the joke is on Russia. Self delusion is a powerful intoxicant, and aren’t they just full of it? A nation obsessed with its own greatness, as long as that greatness is based on suffering and the broken backs of its own people. The ability to destroy what it cannot have seems more important than even its own survival. Constantly inventing new ways to destroy the planet rather than improve it is their apparent obsession. The sooner this version of Russia is swept away and its people given a real opportunity to join the world beyond the confines of their own fears, the better this world will be.
The Analyst
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The Military Analyst 
In my opinion, no soviet commanding officer would ever commit to launching any nuclear weapon against any western army or territory. They know it would be instant armageddon for them so instead I expect they would arrest the tyrant instantly and try to normalize relations with the west long enough for them to install a new government. With the western intelligence services in direct contact at every moment. No surprises would be allowed, none.
I suspect you know that also, and there has been that level of understanding between western and ruZZian military leadership for decades as the tyrant rules the country as their personal fiefdoms.
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You might say that, but I couldnāt possibly comment.
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Thank you TA for your thought provoking article. It would seem that the end of nearly 80 years of Soviet/Russian nuclear sabre rattling is possibly within our grasp. If this happens, there will be those who will be of the view that the nuclear fuelled Cold War finally gave us “Peace in our time”. There will in turn be those who will argue that it will be the final breakup of the Russian Federation that will expose the myth of Russia as a viable nuclear power. Only then can the world begin to recognise the futility of war and concentrate instead on peaceful coexistence.
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The only thing Russian nuclear sabre rattling achieves is support for nuclear deterrence in western countries. For decades pacifists have argued we will be safe if we throw away our nukes, but now everybody has seen what has happened to Ukraine. I would hope and expect the Ukrainians have also learnt the lesson and will replace their deterrent that they were cheated out of. I note that the large size of Flamingo’s payload is ideally suited to a basic atomic weapon.
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Thank you @TA for your nuclear explanations.
If all the Russian nuclear saber-rattling weren’t so tragic, one could actually laugh at this comedy. But as it is, the whole thing is simply a terrible and unfunny self-portrait of the Russians.
This topic came up in my family just last Sunday, and I said almost exactly the same thing. The Russian nuclear threats are completely unnecessary and achieve nothing, except perhaps for the less informed people in the West who are very worried.
We are definitely facing very exciting times ahead. Let’s hope everything turns out well ā but prepare for the worst.
greetings from Switzerland
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