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Russian intercontinental An ICBM was launched from an underground silo in the country’s southern steppe on Friday in a test scheduled to deliver a mock warhead to a remote area of influence about 4,000 miles away. The missile did not even reach an altitude of 4,000 feet.
The Russian military has remained silent about the incident, but the missile crash was seen and heard miles away around Dombarovsky Air Base in Orenburg Oblast near the Russian-Kazakhstan border.
A video clip I posted Russian blog site Militaryrussia.ru on Telegram Images shared widely on other social media platforms showed the missile veering off course immediately after launch before turning upside down, losing power, and then crashing a short distance from the launch site. The missile ejected a component before hitting the ground, possibly as part of a payload rescue sequence, according to Pavel Budwig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva.
The incident was accompanied by a fireball and a noxious red-brown cloud, a telltale sign of the presence of a toxic mixture of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide used to fuel Russia’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missiles. Satellite images taken since Friday show a crater and burn scar near the missile silo.
Analysts say the conditions of the launch indicate 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 kilometers) away, making it the longest-range missile in the world.
Unusable weapon
The Sarmat missile is Russia’s next generation heavy ICBM, capable of carrying up to 10 large nuclear warheads, a combination of warheads and countermeasures, or hypersonic glide vehicles. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Simply put, the Sarmat is a doomsday weapon designed for use in an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States.
Therefore, it is no wonder that Russian officials love to talk about Sarmat’s capabilities. Russian President Vladimir Putin has described the Sarmat as a “truly unique weapon” that would “provide food for thought to those who, in the midst of overheated aggressive rhetoric, are trying to threaten our country.” Dmitry Rogozin, then head of the Russian Space Agency, described the Sarmat rocket as a “super weapon” after its first test flight in 2022.
So far, what sets the Sarmat missile apart is its tendency to fail. The missile’s first full-scale test flight in 2022 appears to have gone well, but the program has suffered a series of successive failures since then, most notably a catastrophic explosion last year. Destruction of an underground Sarmat missile silo In northern Russia.