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| Russia's Original Satan II Nuclear Missile |
International Military - In April 2022, two months after Russia stepped up its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow test-fired the RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). This giant missile that can carry 10 to 14 nuclear warheads is dubbed the West as the Satan II missile. After the test, Russian state television showed what had never been shown before, namely the internal workings of the Satan II missile, which will replace the R-36M2 missile.
The world has been watching the launch of the Satan II missile, but the rare sight of the weapon's true form goes unnoticed. Russian military blogger; Dmitry Kornev, has taken stills from the video about the weapon's true form and posted them to his blog and Twitter account on November 20, 2022. The images, which were reported by Vice, Thursday (24/11/2022), are views unprecedented at the workings of one of the world's largest used nuclear weapons.
The Satan II missile is about 112 feet long and weighs over 211 tons. It turned out to be larger than America's largest ICBM, the LGM-30G Minuteman III, which was less than 60 feet long and weighed about 40 tons. The images Kornev shared show the inside of the missile where its nuclear warhead is stored.
This ICBM is launched from the ground, through the atmosphere, and down to hit its target. While descending, several warheads disconnected and hit their targets. The Kremlin plans to replace the R-36M2 with the RS-28 Sarmat. It was the weapon President Vladimir Putin praised during a 2018 video presentation, in which he showed off a computerized visualization of the nuke wiping out Mar-a-Lago in the US.
In 2020, Moscow declassified footage of the Tsar Bomba, the world's largest nuclear weapon ever tested. The resulting fireball was five miles wide and the mushroom cloud 42 miles high. Tensions between Russia and the West have worsened since the Kremlin escalated its war on Ukraine earlier this year. Putin has been accused of inflating threats of nuclear war when speaking of Western involvement in the war.
The United States has taken a more elaborate approach to its nuclear signaling. Around the same time as Russia's Satan II missile test, the Pentagon announced it would suspend tests of its own ICBM. Then, in September, the US notified Russia that it would go ahead and test some of its ICBMs. A month later, US Central Command revealed that it had a secret nuclear-armed submarine in the Arabian Sea. It was announced via a tweet.
At the same time, Russia and America will sit down in Egypt later this year to discuss the details of the New START agreement. New START is the last remaining nuclear weapons agreement between the two superpowers. The treaty limits the number of deployed nuclear warheads in the world with the aim of reducing their number over time. The treaty has had its enforcement doubted several times during the presidency of Donald Trump, who has relied on the two countries to inspect each other's nuclear sites. Checks have been stopped during the Covid-19 pandemic.