Russia wants this big missile to intimidate the West, but it is still falling
Intercontinental Russian The ICBM was fired from an underground silo in the country’s southern steppe on Friday in a planned test to deliver a dummy warhead to a remote impact zone nearly 4,000 miles away. This missile did not even reach 4000 feet.
The Russian military has been tight-lipped about the incident, but the fall of the missile could be seen and heard for miles around the Dombarovsky air base in Orenburg province, near the Russia-Kazakhstan border.
A video posted on Telegram by the Russian blog site MilitaryRussia.ru and widely shared on other social media platforms shows the missile veer off course immediately after launch, lose power before the trolley spins downwards, and then crash a short distance from the launch site. The missile ejected a component before hitting the ground, possibly as part of a payload salvage sequence, according to Pavel Podwig, a senior researcher at the UN Disarmament Research Institute in Geneva.
The crash was accompanied by a fireball and a noxious reddish-brown cloud, indicative of the toxic mixture of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide used to fuel Russia’s most powerful ICBM missiles. Satellite images taken on Friday show a hole and a burn wound near the missile silo.
Analysts say the circumstances of the launch suggest it was likely a test of Russia’s RS-28 Sarmat missile, a weapon designed to reach targets more than 11,000 miles (18,000 km) away, making it the world’s longest-range missile.
An unusable weapon
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Sarmat missile is Russia’s next-generation heavy ICBM capable of carrying a payload of up to 10 large nuclear warheads, a combination of warheads and countermeasures, or hypersonic booster vehicles. Simply put, the Sarmat is a doomsday weapon designed to be used in an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States.
Therefore, it is not surprising that Russian officials like to talk about Sarmat’s capabilities. Russian President Vladimir Putin called the Sarmat a “truly unique weapon” that would “give food for thought to those who, in the heat of insane aggressive rhetoric, are trying to threaten our country.” Dmitry Rogozin, then head of the Russian space agency, called the Sarmat rocket a “superweapon” after its first test flight in 2022.
So far, what is unique about the Sarmat missile is its tendency to fail. The missile’s first full test flight in 2022 apparently went well, but the program has since suffered a series of setbacks, most notably last year’s catastrophic explosion that destroyed an underground Sarmat missile silo in northern Russia.
