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 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.
