East Calling

BACKGROUND ON RUSSIA'S NEW MISSILE TEST
Interview for The Winers with Scott Ritter

civilnights.com

Научпопик writes:

I have already made incorrect predictions in my life - four times in total, if you take into account public ones.

And one of these four is this recent one, where "in my opinion" turned out to be wrong (and soon there may be a fifth one, but more on that later). What I thought were new guided missiles for the Tornado-S turned out to be a strike by the Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missile. It is hard to rule out that additional strikes will soon be inflicted on it.

I have already explained what a medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) is and how it differs from an ICBM, so I will not repeat myself. I will also remind you that although all MRBMs reach hypersonic speeds, only those that can actively (i.e., with engines) maneuver along the trajectory are called hypersonic, which makes it extremely difficult to intercept. In the case of use against Western air defense, it makes it almost impossible. However, these are all fairly well-known things.

I will only note that this use of the rocket is undoubtedly new:

1. This is the first time in history that a missile's multiple warhead has been used in combat conditions.

2. The missile appears to be equipped with a bus-less warhead deployment system, which is strange. A bus-less system means that all of the missile's warheads will fall in one area; they cannot be used to strike targets that are far from each other.

Missiles originally conceived for nuclear strikes are normally designed differently: they are given a bus-based dispensing system, allowing them to attack several points separated from each other by a considerable distance. Why was the Oreshnik designed differently? Perhaps it was originally conceived as primarily a non-nuclear strike weapon, a sort of Zircon with a range of half a dozen thousand kilometers? It is hard to say.

It is no less strange that the Russian Defense Ministry's statement in the context of its strike in Dnepropetrovsk speaks of the use of a missile in the singular. The video from a great distance shows six groups of falling objects. In the video up close, each of them looks like six oblong objects. Six by six is ​​thirty-six.

If, as follows from the Defense Ministry’s report, there was only one missile, then it turns out that it had six warheads.

But this has never happened before. Such not very large and solid-fuel missiles can have two, three or four warheads. Since the MoD says that all warheads reached the target, it means that there were two missiles. But in the message, the missile is put in the singular. What does this mean? Let me refrain from guessing on this issue.

After all, perhaps there will soon be more specific information on the issue.

The only thing that is worth saying is that we have not had any recent tests of medium-range ballistic missiles. There were some tests about eight years ago for the Rubezh medium-range ICBM, but technically the Rubezh cannot be identical to the Oreshnik - at the very least it is a serious modernization.

Usually, after a major upgrade, the missile is first tested at the proving grounds and more than once - and only then is it launched into battle. What will happen if this is not done, we can all imagine, recalling the many unsuccessful launches of the Bulava.

It seems that our solid-fuel rocket developers have seriously gained confidence in themselves over the past decade.

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Via Sofa General Staff:

🇷🇺 Soldiers of the 1st Guards Tank Army of the "West" group of forces raised the Russian tricolor over Kopanki in the Kharkov region.

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