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from the remember-that-story-this-past-weekend? dept.
A few days ago, on August 8, there was an explosion on a barge in the White Sea near Nyonoksa, Russia. That explosion tragically killed seven people, nuclear engineers and technicians working on a project. The project was described as "an isotopic power source for a liquid engine installation," but let's be completely clear here: they were developing the nuclear propulsion system for a genuinely brutal and terrible weapon.
That weapon is known as 9M730 Burevestnik, known to NATO as the SSC-X-9 Skyfall, but is perhaps best understood as a modern rebirth of a terrifying American weapon concept from the 1960s known as the Flying Crowbar.
The Flying Crowbar was a nuclear-powered scramjet missile, capable of flying at hypersonic speeds with an almost indefinite range, spewing extremely radioactive exhaust and nuclear bombs all over the place.
[...] While this accident is absolutely a tragedy because of the loss of life and the significant radiation exposure in the area, the blow to the development of the 9M730 Burevestnik missile is not the tragic part.
The Burevestnik is not a defensive weapon; it's a weapon to attack at long range and spread death and destruction all along its path, even over people that have no involvement in whatever bullshit reason this thing was launched for.
Wikipedia entries on 9M730 Burevestnik and Flying Crowbar (aka Supersonic Low Altitude Missile).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Coward, Anonymous on Wednesday August 14 2019, @07:09AM (1 child)
Supposedly, half of all US strategic missiles are in submarines. Those would not be disrupted.
(Score: 1) by purdy on Wednesday August 14 2019, @05:23PM
Actually, your SWAG of half is pretty accurate.
The US has 14 SSBNs (aka Boomers), a max of 10 of which are at sea at any given time. (They usually operate on something like 80 days on/35 days off. Each SSBN carries 20 Trident II D5 missiles. Each Trident can carry 8 - 14 warheads depending on the MIRV version. (The newer MIRV V carries only 8 warheads but larger.)
So that gives you about 2200 warheads at sea at any given time with a theoretical max of 3920 if you scrambled all the SSBNs (which would be impossible to do) and they all had the old MIRV IV Tridents. In reality both those numbers are high.
The US nuclear arsenal is estimated at around 4000-4500 warheads so about 2000 in the boomer fleet is a pretty good guess.
Source:
https://www.navy.mil/navydata/fact_display.asp?cid=4100&tid=200&ct=4 [navy.mil]