Russia Wants This Mega Missile to Intimidate the West, but It Keeps Crashing

a Russian intercontinental The ballistic missile (ICBM) was fired from an underground silo on the country’s southern plain on Friday in a scheduled test to deliver a dummy warhead to a remote impact zone some 4,000 miles away. The missile could not reach even 4,000 feet.

Russia’s military is silent on the accident, but the missile crash was seen and heard for miles around Dombarovsky Airport in Orenburg Oblast, near the Russian-Kazakh border.

A video posted on Telegram by Russian blog site MilitaryRussia.ru and widely shared on other social media platforms shows the missile spinning upside down shortly after launch, losing power and then crashing a short distance from the launch site. According to Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva, the missile ejected a component before falling to the ground, probably as part of a payload salvage sequence.

The crash was accompanied by a fireball and a noxious reddish-brown cloud, a clear indication of the poisonous mixture of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide used to fuel Russia’s most powerful ICBMs. Satellite images taken from Friday show a crater and burn marks 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 kilometers) away, making it the world’s longest-range missile.

a useless weapon

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Sarmat missile is Russia’s next-generation heavy-duty ICBM, capable of carrying a payload of up to 10 large nuclear warheads, a combination of warheads and countermeasures, or hypersonic boost-glide vehicles. Simply put, the Sarmat is a cataclysmic weapon designed for use in an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States.

Therefore, it is not surprising that Russian officials love to talk about the capabilities of the Sarmat. Russian President Vladimir Putin has called Sarmat a “truly unique weapon” that will “provide food for thought for those who try to threaten our country in the heat of frenzied aggressive rhetoric.” Dmitry Rogozin, then head of Russia’s space agency, called the Sarmat missile a “superweapon” after its first test flight in 2022.

So far, what is unique about the Sarmat missile is its propensity for failure. The missile’s first full-scale test flight in 2022 apparently went well, but the program has since suffered a series of setbacks, most notably a catastrophic explosion last year that destroyed the Sarmat missile’s underground silo in northern Russia.