Russia have the military armory largest and fiercest in the world, and may be one of the keys to war in ukraine. Now the russian propaganda has explained that the Kremlin has developed a weapon of mass destruction never seen before: Poseidona unmanned underwater drone who throws some hypersonic missiles they can destroy the whole ukrainian coast or, what is the same, with New York, long Island and New Jersey.
Russia successfully launched its first hypersonic missilenicknamed Zirconiaon October 4, 2021. He did it from a submarine in the Arctic, the Kremlin reported, in an operation with simulated targets in the Barents Sea. According to Moscow, which did not specify the number of missiles it has made, a Zircon can fly nine times faster than the Speed of sound and has a range of 1,000 kilometers. Russian propaganda also claims that the nuclear warhead has 100 megatons and it is 3,800 times more powerful than the bomb ‘little boy‘ of 15 kilotons that devastated Hiroshima.
What makes Zircon and Poseidon more lethal than conventional weapons is that hypersonic missiles have the ability to maneuver and therefore avoid missile shields. They can also operate at lower altitudes than ballistic devices, which can be anticipated because they have a fixed trajectory.
The missile launched by Poseidon would cause a 500 meter high tsunami. Hence its name, which honors the god of the seas, also known in mythology for being the ‘shaker of the earth’. The underwater drone is 20 meters long and two meters in diameter while the missile is 5.6 meters long.
Regarding the unmanned drone, Russian propaganda claims that it has record autonomy: it can travel 10,000 kilometers at a speed of 111 kilometers per hour (60 knots). Poseidon could be launched from a submarine, a frigate, or from the very bottom of the sea, where it can be in a latency until activated.
The United States warned in 2018 of the development of these weapons by Russia, which would have produced it in a secret military base located in the Arctic Circle.
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Russia has 4,495 nuclear warheads.
On February 27, the Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered the activation of the nuclear arsenal as a measure of pressure in the war in Ukraine. The latest official records confirm that Russia had a military armory of approximately 4,495 nuclear warheads in January 2021. About 2,585 of them were strategic offensive warheads.
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.