Yet Another Alleged Russian Superweapon

I guess I’m going to have to write something about this. It’s a tempest in a samovar.

I wrote that post just after Mike Turner (R-OH) came out as Chicken Little. It has stood up well.

It appears that

1. Turner’s primary purpose seems to be to show a need to continue Section 702 surveillance. His secondary purpose may be to imply that the Biden administration is unprepared.
2. Russia may be thinking of putting nuclear weapons into orbit.
3. Most of the articles in response to Turner need not have been written.

An enormous number of articles have been published speculating on whatever this NEW WEAPON might be, some from the legal angle (treaties against nuclear weapons and explosions in space), some from a technical angle that enumerate old ideas that haven’t panned out. I haven’t seen the x-ray laser mentioned, so this post is ahead of all the others.

Reporters might want to consider the recent history of Russian superweapons. In 2018, Vladimir Putin announced, with fancy graphics, three new superweapons: a drone submarine (Status-6) that he claimed could inundate the US eastern seaboard with a radioactive tsunami; a nuclear-powered cruise missile (Burevestnik) that could circle the earth and keep cruising until told to drop its nuclear payload; and a hypersonic missile, which was either Kinzhal or Zircon.

At the time, everyone was into hypersonic missiles, which were said to be maneuverable enough to completely avoid interception. Missile experts warned that that was not true, but the stories of an uninterceptable missile were far too much fun to let that slow reporters down. Ukraine now regularly shoots down Kinzhals, and the one Zircon missile that Russia fired into Ukraine crashed after its controllers could not steer it. The missiles are the only of the 2018 superweapons to have gone into production.

Even a large hydrogen bomb would not be enough to cause that radioactive tsunami, although it would do significant damage. The publicity for Status-6 has been effective enough that North Korea has now claimed that they have such an underwater drone.

Something related to Burevestnik was tested in 2019, fell into the White Sea, and killed seven scientists and technicians when they tried to retrieve it, while spewing fission products around the area. More recently, overhead photos showed apparent test preparations at Russia’s Novaya Zemlya nuclear test site. Shortly after, Putin claimed a successful test but no plans for putting Burevestnik into production. No indication of a test showed in surveillance photos.

Russia is not a technological giant. Its recent history of new weapons suggests that someone has been selling Putin on wild ideas that can’t be made operational. Three Russian missile scientists were arrested last May after Ukraine started shooting down Kinzhal missiles. By December, two had been sentenced to prison camps and as many as twelve had been charged.

So when a Republican House committee head rings the alarm bell, let’s look a little further before setting our hair on fire.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner