Top missile designer says new Russian missiles resistant to a first strike

[Robbien]

MOSCOW (AP) - The head of Russia's top missile design centre said Tuesday its latest missiles were built to survive a nuclear attack, ensuring a reliable nuclear deterrent for decades ahead.

Yuri Solomonov, head of the Heat Technology Institute, said its Topol-M and Bulava intercontinental ballistic missiles were much more resistant to an enemy's first strike than their predecessors.

"The results we have achieved allow us to say with certitude . . . that we are capable of ensuring the missiles' survivability," Solomonov said in a speech before the Presidium of Russian Academy of Sciences.

He said that the latest Russian missiles drop their engines at a significantly lower altitude than earlier designs, making it hard for an enemy early warning system to detect the launch. "The reduction of the active phase of flight is the most radical way of dodging the enemy's weapons," he said.

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2006/05/16/1582670-ap.html

[mr_hat]

1. Feh. This bunch will simply re-target the population centers. >

The entire point of our nuclear "triad" is that first strikes mean squat, anyway.

[Mythsaje]

2. Wouldn't an EMP

scramble their circuitry and guidance systems anyway?

Color me confused.

[TheWraith]

4. Those things can be shielded and hardened against EMP

Which sounds like what they're discussing, i.e. the ability to launch their missiles even after a strike.

Not that it really matters in the bigger picture. With ballistic missile submarines, an effective second strike capability has been assured for most major nuclear powers for a very long time.

[Sirveri]

6. most things that make EMP also destroy infastructure.

Thus destroying launchpads and silo door mechanisms. I suspect that they are trying to say that their missle technology will defeat our current efforts at designing an ABM system to shoot incomming warheads down. Which seems like a pointless endeavor for land based missles, though possibly worthwhile for a submarine platform.

[TheWraith]

7. True, although if it's not a direct hit...

The damage to the missile and silo wouldn't prevent a launch. An EMP is effective for a LONG distance past the blast radius of a bomb. Hence, the point I think they were implying, that they've learned ways to better harden their missiles against the effect of near misses.

As for defeating our anti-missile system, it hardly seems worth the effort. The military can't even make the thing reliable when they cheat and use a GPS tracker on the target. Hardly surprising, considering that they're expecting to be able to track a missile moving at thousands of miles an hour and nail it with a kill vehicle in a direct hit.

The only effective way to develop an anti-missile system with current technology is to use interceptors which are themselves nuclear-tipped. With such a weapon, you wouldn't have to actually impact the target, or even get that close to it--just get in the right vicinity, and the blast wave will obliterate the incoming missile. Considering how high the detonation would take place, fallout wouldn't even be a problem. Of course, an actual missile shield really isn't the point of the program, I guess.

[dysfunctional press]

3. the military-industrial complex just got a huge woody...

R & D expenditures are the BEST!

[daleo]

5. Yikes, an engine dropping gap!

Time to fire up the arms race.