Yves here. Please note that some of the speculation about the new Russian Oreshnik missile has been cleared up by later news reports and unusually forthcoming commentary by Vladimir Putin.
Western commentators have tried to minimize the potency of the weapon by saying it did not contain explosives, or worse, suggesting it was a dud. This is a serious misreading. Our esteemed commentariat was early to tease out how the Oreshnik works. From comments:
pugilist Military explosives have energy density of about 4-6 MJ per kilogram
At 3000 meters per second, or about Mach 10, *any* object surpasses that. Meaning any hunk of metal will deal more damage slamming into an object than an equivalent explosive payload would do. No need for fuses, explosives, proximity sensors, etc – greatly simplifying the payload design
redleg >Blasting calculations use distance from the charge divided by either the square or cube of the weight of the charge to get a scaled distance.
Damage would be from:
1. Direct impact of projectile
2. Shockwave from projectile impact (and from air pressure 3+ km/s arrival velocity), which propagates through any material not in a vacuum,
3. Vibration from impact.
Multiply by each warhead, and use the scaled distance from each to calculate cumulative effects of shock/vibration damage extending from the impact.No explosive needed. Energy = 0.5* mass*(velocity^2). The damage will be intense and be more like a hammer blow than an explosion.
What I tried to say (in way too much haste) was that if we assume these were purely kinetic warheads – merely blocks of dense material – then they don’t need that much heat shielding as there’s nothing sensitive to protect inside the warhead. No sensors, no control surfaces.
The impact energy of 80 kg of tungsten hitting at mach 10 will be the same regardless of the surface condition or heat of the projectile, as long as most of the mass reaches the target.
Putin stated, as was already widely surmised, that the Oreshnik was “nuclear capable”. However, give the likely givens above, there does not seem to be any reason for it to carry conventional explosives, since the raw kinetic force + additional superheating damage delivers a much bigger punch.
By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack
The Russian response to the US launching ATACMS short range missiles at targets deep inside Russia was to turn a very large Ukrainian munitions factory into fine dust using a new weapon which Russian President Vladimir Putin claims is currently in production.
The Russian weapon is by reports non-nuclear, but hardly conventional. Per Ted Postol, the missiles fired into Ukraine reportedly traveled at speeds up to Mach 10. They appeared to superheat from a long glide at low altitude that occurred after the missiles reentered the atmosphere. And they combined heat with kinetic energy as they hit their target to create nuclear scale destruction without nuclear technology.
Gilbert Doctorow offers that the new Russian weapon is a smaller version of an existing liquid-fuel propelled ICBM that was first revealed by the Russians in 2018. The non-nuclear ICBM can hit any city in the world, travels so fast that it can’t be stopped, and one missile can destroy a land mass the size of Britain.
The version fired into Ukraine has a solid-fuel rocket, making it more stable than the liquid-fuel version, per Doctorow.
As if to demonstrate the intellectual decline of the US, The New York Times reports that the new Russian weapon can be fitted with nuclear warheads. Why this is stupid almost beyond comprehension is that the weapon produces nuclear-scale destruction without being nuclear. Putting nuclear warheads on it would make it a less effective weapon, not more.
Why this confusion is problematic is that the Times is a mouthpiece for the CIA and Pentagon. If these sources really have this little understanding of the Russian weapon, it indicates an incapacity by the US to comprehend what it is that the Russians have created.
Because of the weapon’s hypersonic speed, it is impossible to stop using currently existing technologies. Given this, as well as the weapon’s destructive capacity, the Russians can destroy any city within range of the weapon with no way for the intended target or its allies to stop it once the weapon has been launched.
But as Doctorow has it, the greater threat is the ICBMs (Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles). If one of these ICBMs were to hit, say Philadelphia, it would take out New York and Washington as well, the ‘Eastern corridor’ of the US. The US as a nation would cease to exist were this to occur.
Some pundits in Europe appear to be confused as to who it is that is firing the ATACMS missiles into Russia. Several otherwise knowledgeable talking heads have asserted that it is Ukraine that is firing the missiles. This likely came from the Biden administration’s framing that it ‘had given Ukraine permission to fire’ the missiles when, for technical and security reasons, only the Americans can launch them.
The point: the Ukrainians didn’t fire the ATACMS missiles at Russia, the Americans did. By pretending that the decision to fire additional missiles lies with Zelensky and the Ukrainians, the Biden administration wants to control the process without taking responsibility for the consequences.
The Biden administration appears to be assuming that the rest of the world is as gullible and ignorant of basic facts as it is. The Russians know who fired the missiles. At present, to the extent that there is confusion amongst the belligerents, it is on the American and European side.
With apologies for the use of the phrase, the new weapons give Russia ‘escalation dominance,’ meaning that Russia will prevail against foes as the parties escalate due to the lethality and speed of the new weapons.
With its military cupboards bare, the only escalatory response that the US has left is nuclear weapons. Despite claims to the contrary emanating from the Biden White House, the Trump-elect administration, and the American defense establishment, almost any use of nuclear weapons will set in motion a chain of events that will end humanity.
After the new Russian weapon landed in Ukraine, the Biden administration launched a second volley of ATACMS missiles into Russia. This, as members of the US military publicly proposed that the US place nuclear weapons in Ukraine and stated that the US is prepared to prevail in a nuclear war.
The Russians have already stated that Russia will not accept nuclear weapons being placed in Ukraine because of Ukraine’s proximity to Russia. According to retired US Colonel Doug MacGregor, the US does have the nuclear weapons to place in Ukraine. They are about all that the US has left according to MacGregor.
The incoming Trump administration is looking even dumber and more dangerous than Biden & Co., with Trump’s Deputy National Security advisor, Sebastion Gorka, and National Security advisor, Mike Walz, both displaying crude belligerence, near complete ignorance of basic facts, and a certainty that truly, deeply, unworkable ideas will change the course of history. Note: this is a decent description of Biden and his brain trust as well. And they got us to the current mess.
For instance, Gorka is pushing the Trump campaign’s silliness that Trump will threaten to flood Ukraine with weapons until Putin begs for a cease-fire deal. One problem with this idea is that Ukraine is out of armies. Flood away, there is no one left to use the American weapons. Another problem is that, according to the military folk referenced above, the American military’s cupboards are bare, meaning that the weapons needed to flood Ukraine with will need to first be produced.
This makes the Trump plan for Ukraine a three—five-year proposition.
The extra not-well-thought-outedness of the plan is that the whole logic of Biden drawing the Russians into Ukraine was to ‘bleed Russia.’ The idea, as was reported in the US press, was that Russia would waste blood and treasure in Ukraine to the point where the Americans could organize a Color Revolution, remove Mr. Putin, and then loot Russia’s resources. While this makes Biden and his compatriots industrial scale scumbags, it also reveals their profound ignorance of how far both Russia and China have developed since such a move was practicable.
The irony of the Trump plan, if anything this dangerous can be ironic, is that it would ‘bleed’ the US. 1) the US currently lacks the weapons to back-up Trump’s threat. 2) the lead -time and cost to produce the weapons that Trump is threatening to deploy are prohibitive. 3) the ‘plan’ reads like good old-fashioned American bullshit and bluster, because that is what it is.
What is most telling about what the Americans are doing and saying is that they don’t appear to understand the position that they have put the US, and the world, into. If the Americans could either match or stop Russia’s hypersonic weapons, which they can’t, then their threats might seem impolitic, crude, and unnecessarily belligerent, but not totally batshit crazy.
If Trump imagines that the war in Ukraine will be ended with the three Bs, belligerence, bullshit, and bluster, this seems a weak plan. The second-order problem for Trump is that his planned Greater Israel war against the entire Middle East depends on first ending the US war in Ukraine.
While this may read as an opportunity for the US to not recreate Hitler’s march through Europe, only in the Middle East, the more likely result is that getting bogged down in Stalingrad (Ukraine) will be the coup de grace. If the consequences could be confined to the politicians who created this mess, justice might be served. But that isn’t how the West works. They will be in bunkers as the rest of us are sent to the great beyond. Thank you, Joe Biden.
Much of the technical information in this note came from public interviews with Ted Postol, Gilbert Doctorow, Scott Ritter, and Douglas MacGregor.
Severe lack of critical thinking there by Gorka … that was already tried, it was called the Biden strategy. It already failed.
It’s now gotten so bad that the Pentagon has stated they’re out of weapons to send and can’t spend the existing authority that Congress provided.
Gorka’s grandfather came from the Arrow cross movement, father fled the country after the 56 anti soviet uprising to Britain then our Sebastian returned to Hungary in 92 as a self styled expert in terrorism, current affairs,etc,,in other words stirring up Russia hatred and after 9/11 Muslim hatred but seemingly now an admirer of the Jews as well, since they hate Muslims and Russians and the US govt idolises Israel. Which just shows these dangerous lunatics can’t make their minds up, they’ve too much time on there hands so the unreal Washington think tank scene is the perfect environment for them, bad news for everyone else on earth.
Remember that the Hungarian Second Army was one of the Axis units destroyed at Stalingrad, too…
While the Fed might be able to print dollars it can’t print weapons or soldiers to utilize them
If the Americans could either match or stop Russia’s hypersonic weapons, which they can’t, then their threats might seem impolitic, crude, and unnecessarily belligerent, but not totally batshit crazy.
Today in AP news: https://apnews.com/article/navy-hypersonic-weapon-zumwalt-china-russia-ec3272a36042796518aec665a4e65df3
‘Stealth destroyer to be home for 1st hypersonic weapon on a US warship’
‘ to be’ is doing a lot of work in that headline, but a non careful read says we have such a weapon. Scary times.
“A U.S. hypersonic weapon was successfully tested”
Well that´s simply 99% not true. If it were we would have gotten WH and Navy and Army stating just that. But none of it. Still AP and friends keep repeating it.
The Warzone:
Hypersonic Weapon Just Tested In Florida, Results Unclear
Vague details about a recently “initiated” test comes after the Army scrubbed three planned hypersonic missile launches last year.
30/7/24
https://www.twz.com/land/hypersonic-weapon-just-tested-in-florida-results-unclear
Jen Judson from defensenews.com:
“not a single official at SMD brought up a late July Florida test. There was obviously a big focus on the Hawaiian test in May… and there’s more testing to come but when I asked I was told no details could be divulged. This has been a pain in the butt to cover and all we can get is cryptic piecemeal.”
9/8/24
https://nitter.poast.org/JenJudson/status/1821880740079906848#m
NATO spokesperson on that area, Kerstin Huber, said, wait another 20 years for it. So does Martyanov.
With the new info out on metals and speed issues and heating of Oreshnik we have a first indicator (of many) why this is not unlikely.
My non careful read says a ship that failed at everything is going to be armed with weapons that do not exist yet. Money well spent.
>”a ship that failed at everything is going to be armed with weapons that do not exist”
🤣
exactly!
p.s. I forgot which US Senator had made that great comment in the 1990s when the B2 was announced for $1billion a piece: If the B2-bomber is invisible why don´t we just claim we build it and in reality we don´t and save billions in taxpayer money.
AG: Perhaps that’s exactly what they did… In any case, it’s certainly a good description of how all the trillions in MIC money, also in NATO, has been spent for the last thirty or so years. Of course, they didn’t save taxpayers any money. They just directed it to their own interests.
Jacques Baud in his recent interview with Nima compared the Oreshnik strike to US use of nuclear weapons in Japan, putting Russia in same position now as US occupied post WW2.
According to Annie Jacobson, author of ‘Nuclear War,’ as well as Doug MacGregor and Ted Postol, US ICBMs are hypersonic for part of their flight.
MacGregor thinks that this will be the research basis of future US efforts to build hypersonic missiles. But that would be years into the future.
“As if to demonstrate the intellectual decline of the US, The New York Times reports that the new Russian weapon can be fitted with nuclear warheads. Why this is stupid almost beyond comprehension is that the weapon produces nuclear-scale destruction without being nuclear. Putting nuclear warheads on it would make it a less effective weapon, not more.”
This is incorrect
– A 1 kg object at 3000 m/s has a kinetic energy of 4.5MJ
– Suppose the object is made of steel and was heated to 4000 degrees Celsius during the glide, that would add 2MJ, so total energy is 6.5MJ
– TNT is about 4.18MJ /kg. As far as I know, common conventional military bombs use explosives around 6MJ/ kg, so it is in the same ballpark as a pure steel object at mach 10 and superheated to 4000 degrees Celsius
– Nukes are many orders of magnitude more powerful:
1 Mt = 4.18 × 10¹⁵ joules. Weighs about 2000 kg –> 2,090,000 MJ/kg
100 kt = 4.18 × 10¹⁴ joules. Weighs about 500 kg –> 836,000 MJ/kg.
1kt = 4.18 × 10¹² joules. Weighs ~200 kg –> 20,900 MJ/kg
That last one would be a low-yielding tactical nuke.
YuShan you are too generous. This article is beyond ridiculous and so far into the realm of magical thinking that it belongs on Twitter. Back to high school physics for this fellow.
Another way to easily debunk this is that of course the Kinetic energy of the weapon has to be produced by the rocket at launch. So burning of the rocket fuel (=chemical reaction) needs to produce at least as much energy as a nuclear warhead. No way! :)
What about gravity assist on way back in atmosphere? I was under impression that the MIRV had its own propulsion/ guidance as well.
It called potential energy and it’s only a fraction of the kinetic energy the vehicle has. The point here is that the destructive power is not up to nuclear warheads, even if it’s likely to be 3-4 times more than a conventional warhead (per unit of weight).
Mr. Putin himself just stated that several of Oreshniks hitting one target is needed to reach tactical nuke level result. Meaning that should Russia have 8-10 of them (and the scuttlebutt claims 20-30 already in service) they can, if need be, use them for similar effect.
Still won’t make it.
Even the most optimal drop shaped impactor would stall out at a few hundred meters per second.
The impactor needs propulsion to get past that.
Exactly, this article is beyond stupid.
Economists can’t do high school physics. That’s the whole problem with the economy.
I would say that the problem with Economics is that economists can do nothing but high school physics.
Think I messed up my first attempt so here’s the Doctorow discussion of the new weapon as he has learned from his Russia watching.
https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2024/11/27/transcript-of-judging-freedom-edition-of-27-november-2024/
I have to admit that that Russian technology is a genius idea. American intelligence assessed that there was no chance that the Russians would use nukes in the Ukraine and that is what they must have told the White House. Of course Team Biden’s take on that was that they push Russia as hard as they could as wanted and that they would just have to sit there and take it as they would not resort to nukes. But with this new missile technology, the Russians now have the option of using a missile that can hit with the destructive power of a small nuke but with no blowback because they aren’t nukes. Russia’s allies would object to the use of a nuke but not these missiles. The Ukrainians may be trying to brazen out and say ‘Tis but a scratch’ but I heard that their entire parliament did a runner when Putin started to talk about hitting decision-making centers.
Can anyone suggest a weapon or a fact on the ground that would cause the US to back down in Ukraine? Is there anything that would create a reality that our intelligence community and military would agree was insurmountable and required capitulation to Putin’s demands?
I can’t imagine something that would create that situation. I think we will fight these Russians until we have nothing to throw at them but rocks and all the blood of Ukraine has been sacrificed.
The most important weapon in our hands is US Dollar – DXY Index at 105. If this index goes down to bellow 70, then our troops will come back home from foreign lands.
It is not so much about backing down as the US thinking it could push Russia against the wall that is nuclear escalation. Most of Russia’s nuclear posturing is just that posturing, without an adequate cause (launching 60-100 missiles, 50 to 70 ATACMS and 10 to 30 Stormshadows/Scalps, on symbolic targets to generate propaganda headlines isn’t) Russia can’t drop a nuke. Dropping a nuke without that cause will result in 2/3 of the world that is being neutral to move to the US camp and suddenly have 194 countries complying with US demand for sanctions.
By showing this missile that can go after hardened targets Russia put the kibosh on that since they can now pursue targets that would have required nukes. The threat of going after US installations (the (anti-)ballistic missile installation in Poland) should not be completely discounted since it can be done using this missile but again is posturing.
Another miscalculation was that the current US administration believes their own propaganda with regards to Trump and expected Russia to wait 2 months with responding to escalations since they think “why bother making it harder for the Russian asset that will move into the White House at that point”. Which completely ignores the internal situation in Russia thinking that the only thing that matters is the US.
Something must have been lost in translation here. The amount of kinetic energy required to destroy a land mass the size of Britain is on the order of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. For reference, that is estimated to be a 7km wide chunk of rock traveling at 20,000 meters per second.
Right. Per my Doctorow link above he says the point of the weapon is precision rather than area destruction. He says Kiev is a sacred city to the Russians and therefore they are reluctant to level the place but an unstoppable bullet to known regime hideouts makes Kiev targeting a lot more feasible.
And that goes for elsewhere in Europe as well. The lack of radioactive fallout is part of this of course.
>>> The non-nuclear ICBM can hit any city in the world, travels so fast that it can’t be stopped, and one missile can destroy a land mass the size of Britain.
Even if that missile was nuclear armed with 6 to 12 400kt nuclear warheads (typical yield of US Minuteman missiles), a single *nuclear* missile delivered over Britain would inflict serious damage—but not destroy it. MIRV warheads do not possess the level of damage as the insanely large >30 megaton H-bombs that were tested in the 1950’s.
There are multiple websites online where you can overlay on a map the damage of a single A-bomb explosion of various yields. see https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Agreed. This new Russian weapon system may well have impressive long-range destructive potential especially for deep and hardened targets, but “… and one missile can destroy a land mass the size of Britain…” sorry, that’s just wrong. The Russians are not ignorant peasants but they are not twelve feet tall either.
Lots have been lost in translation, and in opinions od various “experts”, hence the warning at the very beginning.
I have been wondering about the “flat trajectory” information. All videos of the impacts I have seen look like the warheads are on high angle final approach trajectories, which would imply, if the overall trajectory is flat, a large change of direction, 60 degrees or more, in the final approach to target. That would, I think, require a lot of drag and loss of kinetic energy if done through a maneuverable carrier vehicle that relied on aerodynamic effects (“glide vehicle”) for path control.
In a Daniel Davis video with Ted Postol, Postol suggested (@10:00 and following) that the pattern of arrival times was consistent with release of the 6 x 6 payload packages on slightly different ballistic trajectories (that converge to near the same impact site) near the mid-point of the trajectory. If the impactors’ approach was ballistic and steep, I don’t see how the boost trajectory can have been flat.
Perhaps all the videos happen to have been taken from a location along the direction of the missile flight, so that the apparent steep final approach is an illusion due to perspective.
Agreed, everything I have read about hypersonic missiles is that they slow down a lot in the atmosphere, so if the point is to hit at high speed you want a steep trajectory.
And a steep final approach is preferable if the goal is to destroy hardened and deep underground facilities.
The descriptions of hypersonic glide vehicles I have seen describe them as maneuverable, but there is a big difference between path adjustment maneuvers to avoid or spoof defensive measures and a radical change of direction, from nearly flat to nearly vertical trajectory.
Perhaps we will learn more if interpretable fragments of the carrier vehicle(s) can be recovered and the implications are made public.
Postol said something very different. He seemed to think the flat trajectory was brilliant. He said the missiles looked to be traveling at the upper edge of the atmosphere (hence little drag) and were “skipping” on it like a stone. He did not go into technical detail, sadly.
I will be very curious to learn more, if that is ever made public.
My concern relates to “how do you go from ‘near horizontal’ to ‘near vertical’ flight via hypersonic aero-drag?” Back-of-head ‘back-of-envelope’ estimate seems to me to require that all the horizontal deceleration has to take place within a distance to target that is comparable to the elevation of the flat flight path prior to the final descent to target. Assuming a 20km elevation during the flat part of the trajectory, that suggests it has to lose about 3 km/s of horizontal velocity (and convert that to vertical velocity, since by definition a flat flight path has little vertical speed) in something like 10 seconds, which is ~40 gravities acceleration (total delta V is about 4 km/s, to go from 3km/s horizontal to 3 km/s vertical).
To do that via aero-braking at the very end of the flight path and retaining precision control of the impact locations is, it seems to me, an astonishing accomplishment, if that is what they have done.
> one missile can destroy a land mass the size of Britain.
I challenge this statement.
Earth Impact Effects Program
Your Inputs:
Distance from Impact: 100.00 km ( = 62.10 miles )
Projectile diameter: 10.00 meters ( = 32.80 feet )
Projectile Density: 10000 kg/m3
Impact Velocity: 3.00 km per second ( = 1.86 miles per second )
Impact Angle: 90 degrees
Target Density: 2750 kg/m3
Target Type: Crystalline Rock
The projectile lands intact, with a velocity 2.66 km/s = 1.65 miles/s.
Transient Crater Diameter: 209 meters ( = 687 feet )
Transient Crater Depth: 74 meters ( = 243 feet )
Final Crater Diameter: 262 meters ( = 858 feet )
Final Crater Depth: 55.7 meters ( = 183 feet )
The crater formed is a simple crater
The floor of the crater is underlain by a lens of broken rock debris (breccia) with a maximum thickness of 25.8 meters ( = 84.7 feet ).
At this impact velocity ( < 12 km/s), little shock melting of the target occurs.
The major seismic shaking will arrive approximately 20 seconds after impact.
Richter Scale Magnitude: 3.0
I agree, this is off, and have no idea how Urie came up with this.
I missed it on a fast skim and would have gotten Urie to correct it or issued a big caveat in my intro had I seen it.
My interpretation of that error is that he is describing (or confusing with) what could happen if an Oreshnik were equipped with 6 x 6 city-buster thermonuclear warheads. The warheads would be unstoppable and, if targeted appropriately, would destroy most of the urban regions of the country. It seems unlikely to me that this many nuclear warheads could be contained in the Oreshnik payload section, but even one would cause an unprecedented, for NATO, catastrophe.
Likewise, the statement
“if one of these ICBMs were to hit, say Philadelphia, it would take out New York and Washington as well, the ‘Eastern corridor’ of the US. The US as a nation would cease to exist were this to occur.”
must be wrong. The largest nuclear warhead ever detonated, the Soviet RDD-220 in 1961, had a yield of 50 megatons, and caused superficial damage up to about one hundred and fifty miles away. Now yes, airburst, groundburst, atmospheric conditions etc, but the idea that a conventional weapon could have effects further away than that seems impossible.
I’m thinking it was a long-covid brain fart, not caught by reporter or AI or spell-check. Berlin?
My first thought after reading the article was, “Oh, great, we are talking life-on-earth ending blasts, like the dinosaur-killing asteroid…”
Augmenting anthropogenic climate disruption with yet another human contrivance. We are some clever monkey!
I got this from an interview that Nima did with Gilbert Doctorow on Dialogue Works. Link is below.
A followup search yielded no relevant information to contradict Doctorow’s assertion.
Of those commenting on the Oreshnik weapon, none covered the territory that Doctorow did. It seems quite relevant. It is a much larger version of the Oreshnik with a liquid fueled rocket.
The ‘destroy a land mass the size of England’ comment by Doctorow was the basis of the Philadelphia / New York / Washington comment.
It’s well and good to state what something isn’t. If the Russian ICBM doesn’t destroy a land mass the size of England, how large is its destructive footprint?
It is consequential, isn’t it?
If the contention is that the details make a material difference, or pose a significant challenge to the thesis regarding the politics, please, make that case.
If that argument is convincingly made, I’m glad to change my mind, and I’m glad to do so in public.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozlu7UFtR4o
I think he is conflating this new system with its big sister the ICBM Avangard system carrying Sarmats.
Ok hold on a minute. The facility hit was PA Pivdenmash I believe which can’t have been more than a square mile or two. How did we get from its destruction to saying that one Orenshnik “can destroy a land mass the size of Britain”?
Maybe someone said “the city of London” which is depicted as a square mile?
He has mistaken it for Poseidon. It’s hard to keep up with all these weapons. :-p
Doctorow’s remark was made regarding the ICBMs. They are, according to Doctorow, many multiples of the size of the Oreshnik. They also fly twice as fast, to Mach 20, according to (missile expert) Ted Postol,
If I understand correctly, velocity and mass determine the size of the impact. So, much larger missiles traveling much faster make a much larger explosion.
Also, with the push back that I am getting for citing Doctorow, to my knowledge, no one else has addressed the ICBMs.
When it comes to ‘escalation dominance,’ they certainly seem relevant.
So what’s going to be America’s moonshot? Or is there even going to be one? Perhaps turn Musk’s Starlink satellites into an array of Golden Eye(s)?
Musk is going to send all his cars to Russia, and make them explode at the same time.
I am not sure there can be a moonshot. Certainly not a rapid deployment of anything to change the current status in Ukraine.
For a moonshot involving new tech and new manufacturing capabilities and new science backing them up… You’d need a bureaucratic and an academic support system under the Trump administration. You’d need a federal contracting system that was more interested in delivering results than profits. You’d need a manufacturing base to support those systems. You’d need simple people to do the work and keep it secret. All of that assumes you have a plan in place with several potential candidates that you can align those systems and workforce behind.
From the inception of the Manhattan Engineer District to dropping the first bomb on Hiroshima took about 4 years. That was during a much different time and the US had a very different society and industrial base. There’s no evidence to say the US or its allies have started this process. So if we say Oreshnik’s debut is the start of serious planning for NATO then past precedent from this kind of project is we might have something worth deploying in 2028.
I don’t think a moonshot led by the US is a possibility here.
“keep it secret”
LOL…when EVERY little part has to be shipped from overseas.
Probably working on something like bullets that need software updates. $AA$ weapon$.
This Oreshnik flight was an experimental attempt and the likelihood of the successful delivery of a nuclear weapon is quite low. What are the odds of this system delivering a working thermonuclear device that has been heated to 3,000 C? It is unlikely to happen. I read that Russia is talking about beginning nuclear testing again. This is likely intended to cover the unplanned disintegration of warheads over eastern Russia and the resulting dispersal of plutonium in the atmosphere. Interesting times indeed.
Now you’re really speculating. What I’m reading from MOA, Doctorow and others is that this being a non explosive “kinetic” weapon is the whole point and part of the key to the hypersonic speeds. What they mainly needed were special materials that wouldn’t disintegrate before they hit the ground and some sort of survivable guidance to fine tune the steering of the individual warheads as they are falling. This is considered far in advance of any technology that NATO has. So the main takeaways are 1) unstoppable and highly destructive precision 2) rapid flight time to target and 3) not nuclear and therefore immune to the post WW2 nuclear use taboo.
In other words if you are within range and Russia knows where you are then you are DOA no matter how bunkered.
The designer of Oreshnik they are on track to develop even more effective heat shielding, so your underlying premise is off. From Andrei Martyanov:
https://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-creator-of-oreshnik.html
The bigger issue, as hamstak points out below, is not whether it could become technically feasible to deliver a nuke at this speed, but what it the point? We air burst the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nukes out of the view that that would have maximum effect. Perhaps there might be a special case where you might want a below surface explosion (and could the impact energy be used as the detonator?).
Putin most definitely did say the Oreshnik could (not necessarily right now) deliver nukes, so this is an adaptation Russia is working on. I would be loath to dismiss the idea in light of that. Putin does not bluff.
My speculation takes very little space. They have a reason to consider resuming testing but I have no idea what it is. The melting point of tungsten metal is 3,422C, but I am sure components inside a device would be heated to a very high point regardless of the shielding. I don’t think entropy has stopped working yet. By the way, I’m not making it up.
Asked in an interview with TASS on Saturday whether Moscow is considering the resumption of nuclear tests as a response to the escalatory actions of the US, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov replied that “the issue is on the agenda.”
“Without getting ahead of myself, I will simply say that the situation is quite complex. It is constantly being considered in all its components and aspects,” he said.
Martyanov announced a video for next week where he would debunk “disinfo” also spread by Postol…
we´ll see what he means by that in detail.
Thanks, I’ll keep an eye out for this.
I only saw Postol weigh in once, via Nima at Dialogue Works, and I was not impressed. I have had doubts about the extreme deference shown to him by the likes of Ray McGovern, when Postol has long been retired and it is not clear how good a job he could do on keeping current.
Now admittedly Martyanov is too often cursory so he may not land much of a blow.
Regarding the kinetic vs. nuclear dispute, a few thoughts (and I apologize if any of this has been covered and I missed it):
1) Total energy is not necessarily the best metric (it is rather like GDP in economics). The way that the energy is dispersed is important. In the case of a nuke, the explosive pressure is three-dimensional; with the hypersonic kinetic munition the force is linear (one-dimensional) and the pressure initially confined to a small area (two-dimensional) — perhaps a nail is a better analogy than the head of a hammer, at least with respect to the immediate impact — with the energy spreading as it strikes subsequent material. Free fall might even prove sufficient (though course-correction and maneuverability would still come into play.)
2) The destructive efficacy is mission-dependent. Am I trying to wipe out a broad swath of surface objects, or eliminate deep targets in a relatively confined area?
3) Nukes arriving at mach 10 make no sense. To my knowledge nukes are usually detonated at height above the target as it was determined early on that this would have the greatest destructive effect.
4) However, there are, generally speaking, two velocities in question: terminal velocity of the munition, and the average velocity from launch to munition release point. So this still could serve as a useful platform for delivering a nuclear package a certain distance in a short period of time.
5) Given that a nuke is a high-value payload, the concern would not be with speed but with probability of interception. When combined with decoys (or even active decoys, as an earlier Millennium 7 post linked here described), terminal velocity would only have to be fast enough to assist in reducing the estimated probability of interception to whatever value they find acceptable.
6) Another consideration is economics. The kinetic variant may be an order of magnitude less expensive than its nuclear partner, even considering whatever expense exotic materials production incurs. Maybe not as much bang (though, again, a different kind of bang) for the buck.
Hamstak raises a point I’ve been wanting to see discussed by commenters more competent than I.
Given that explosives typically dissipate their energy in three dimensions, I had been thinking of kinetics as more comparable to a shaped charge. But as Hamstak explains, this difference stands to be even more pronounced. I had read in some of the preliminary discussions of the Oreshnik that each kinetic projectile might be 7 centimeters in diameter. Imagine then, the kinetic (rather than 3D explosive) being applied along a single dimension aligned with the trajectory of the projectile to a cross-section of target material 7 centimeters across, of course with energy dissipations along that cross-section through the outward propagation of thermal and mechanical shock as adjacent material is liquified and vaporized (and plasma shock?).
A further question for the chemical engineers. It’s been rumored that some modern military explosives may be exploiting some newly established properties of metal (aluminum) powders as part of the overall chemical mix. Is it conceivable that the kinetic projectile, presumably of tungsten or like material, itself has special explosive properties of its own as it is vaporized on impact?
“Free fall might even prove sufficient (though course-correction and maneuverability would still come into play.)”
That should apply to comment 5), not 2) — sorry about that.
Since most of us have found that important info is not all going to be found in a single source or statement, the “Britain” detail in Urie’s article need not upstage the realities being ignored by willful Western “leaders.”
Nothing demonstrates better the intellectual and moral decline of the US that the insistence shown in the Congress, and by individuals like Sullivan, on Ukrainians recruiting the younger.
I’m not a science guy at all, but over the years Putler has spoken of Russian weapons exploiting new physical principles. Hearing the term ‘plasma shock’ used in preliminary speculations about Oreshnik, one can at least wonder if the plasma envelope itself lends properties to the strike. Generally speaking, is some fraction of the thermal/kinetic energy required to produce and maintain a plasma field not itself “stored” at the time of impact?
Plasma is a fourth state or phase of matter–phase changes from solid to liquid and liquid to gas entail disproportionate energy transfers. Does plasma’s rapid collision w/ matter in other phases produce little explored effects?
For example, from the journal Physics:
‘unlike the shockwave from an airplane traveling at Mach speed, which dissipates its kinetic energy into heat through molecular collisions, a shockwave in a collisionless plasma (a collisionless shock) involves a more complicated dissipation mechanism. The energy is divided up between the plasma constitutents, with some going to ions, some to electrons, and a fraction to the generation of magnetic fields ‘
That was a collision less plasma study–what about plasma in collision?
Any physicists out there wanting to take a crack at this?
Is this Putler in room with you right now?
The new capability provided by Oreshnik is that it can destroy extensive underground structures which are now indefensible. This puts all Ukrainian underground command and control facilities at risk, including Zelensky’s hideout.
What happens if those hit the San Andreas Fault?
“If Trump imagines that the war in Ukraine will be ended with the three Bs, belligerence, bullshit, and bluster, this seems a weak plan. The second-order problem for Trump is that his planned Greater Israel war against the entire Middle East depends on first ending the US war in Ukraine.”
Just spitballin’, but:
If the US govt has no leverage in negotiations with Russia, Russia could possibly tack on conditions about the Middle East. Maybe a concern they also have?