Angry in the Great White North

Via Drudge, a report on a new Russian super-missile:

President Vladimir Putin boasted Tuesday that Russia has missiles capable of penetrating any missile defense system, Russian news reports said.

"Russia ... has tested missile systems that no one in the world has," the ITAR-Tass, Interfax and RIA Novosti news agencies quoted him as saying at a news conference. "These missile systems don't represent a response to a missile defense system, but they are immune to that. They are hypersonic and capable of changing their flight path."

He said he had shown the working principles of the missile systems to French President Jacques Chirac during a visit to a Russian military facility.

Seems strange to show off the missile to anyone. Chirac hasn't said anything publicly.

Does this missile exist? Or is it just some sort of bizarre posturing?

Putin said that the new missiles were capable of changing both the altitude and the direction of their flight, making it impossible for an enemy to intercept them.

"A missile defense system is designed to counter missiles moving along a ballistic trajectory," Putin was quoted as saying.

Putin and other Russian officials have boasted of the new missiles in similar comments in recent years, but they haven't identified them or given any further details other than about their ability to change their flight path on approach to a target.

Is is some sort of cruise missile? Any sort of hypersonic engine would consume fuel at a prodigious rate, so the range of the cruise missile would be limited. It would have launched close to the target, meaning launched from a sub or a bomber. Russia's subs are rusting (when they're not sinking), and there is nothing hypersonic or invulnerable about a big lumbering bomber.

As it turns out, this is a traditional ICBM. It reaches hypersonic speeds the way every ICBM warhead reaches hypersonic speeds -- by dropping onto the the target from suborbital space. This super-warhead will fly on the Topol-M missile.

The warhead then maneuvers on the way to the target. I guess this warhead maneuvers more than current designs do. But at the speed at which it is dropping, I can't imagine it can maneuver all that much and still get back on target.

Remember too that the less accurate the warhead, the bigger the bomb has to be in order to destroy the target. Russian missiles have never been all that accurate, which is why their warheads seemed so frighteningly large. But if the maneuvering warhead potentially decreases accuracy (while improving survivability) then the warhead has to be even larger. And that works against maneuverability, which then diminishes survivability.

It's a tricky balancing act.

Finally, it must be said that the Americans want a system capable of taking out incoming missiles at different phases of the attack. The best would be at the boost phase, when the enemy is first launching the missile. The missile is very slow, and very big (all the stages of the rocket are still attached). As a bonus, the debris falls back on the enemy. Massive lasers mounted on 747s are used for this sort of defense, attempting to burn a hole in a fuel tank from a safe distance. Then there is the suborbital phase, when the warhead is arcing high over the polar regions. I doubt there is much maneuvering going on here either. Satellite-mounted weapons on station over flight paths defined by the mathematics of space flight will try to pick them off here.

So maybe the warhead turns into something like the space shuttle, performing a hypersonic glide to the target, with limited ability to alter trajectory by the use of control surfaces but no actual engines. That means it is maneuverable only in the atmosphere. Assuming it survives the first layers of defense, it now faces two problems. If it engages the "jinking" phase by entering the atmosphere close over the target, it won't be able to do too much maneuvering -- there won't be enough time. If it re-enters the atmosphere farther from the target, it has more time to jink left-and-right and up-and-down. But then the warhead itself remains a target for a longer period of time, meaning more time for an anti-missile missile to knock it down, and even to make multiple attempts to take it out.

Plus there is the problem for the warhead to find the target, which means the warhead has to reestablish its own position in three dimensions after a space flight. GPS or the Russian equivalent will do that, but remember that re-entering the atmosphere and then maintaining hypersonic speeds means being surrounding by an envelope of super-heated air. Ionized gases might interfere with the ability to get a good signal. Plus it's just one more thing to go wrong. A traditional missile doesn't have this problem, since as long as it re-enters the atmosphere at the right point, gravity takes care of the rest.

Finally, it's not like this thing has got a radar on it for tracking incoming anti-missile missiles (it might have a radar for detecting the ground in order to detonate at the optimum altitude, but that won't help for tracking little fast missiles -- wrong wavelength). So it won't actually be avoiding an anti-missile defense missile. Any jinking will be pre-programmed or pseudo-random events, and not in reaction to an incoming threat. That means it is just as likely that the warhead will be flying straight and even when the anti-missile missile is closing in.

Remember, if you want this thing to have an engine, fuel, control surfaces, tracking radar, and onboard electronics to control it all, you won't be leaving much room for a warhead. Plus everything has to sit on top of a ICBM rocket. Weight is always a premium. You want a big warhead with all the bells and whistles, then you need a big rocket to carry it. As I mentioned, the Topol-M will carry this warhead, but it is expensive and well behind the planned deployment schedule.

Bottom line, I'm not sure what to believe. The Russians might have something here, but it might be a lot less than Putin makes it out to be. Or a lot less effective than he thinks.

Or maybe they're just making the whole thing up.

The fact that he's talking about it openly makes me think this is really a propaganda exercise. It's not like the Americans and Russians are going to war, so no one will ever know whether the super-warhead really works. But it is an attempt by the Russians to insist that they are not impotent in the face of the American missile defense, and so should remain a power to be feared and respected.

Why do I think that? Because the French have exactly the same goal as the Russians when it comes to trying to maintain some sort of power and influence parity with the Americans, even as technologically they fall behind. So if Putin showed Chirac a paper airplane with the word "missile" scribbled on the side in crayon, you can be sure Chirac would tell one and all he saw a super-missile that makes American missile defense useless.

Oh yes, and the French version of the paper airplane super-missile will be ready next week.