Russian Nuclear Triad: Status and Warheads

Yeah no need for those. Russians are solving these issues with their novel delivery methods. Autonomous torpedoes and hypersonics both with nuclear warheads. Hypersonics with nuke warheads would be used as decapitators and the poseidon would be used as deterrence to defend against decapitation strikes.

The Russians need to wipe out european nato in order to ensure that they will not pose a threat to Russia's recovery, hence cobalt bombs become practical.

Estimation of the number of nuclear charges in the world as of February 2022

https://twitter.com/AZmilitary1/status/1533246474301198336/photo/1

The-thing-next-door wrote:The Russians need to wipe out european nato in order to ensure that they will not pose a threat to Russia's recovery, hence cobalt bombs become practical.

Why would you bomb the unfriendly neighbours with a weapon blowing huge amounts of Cobalt-60 in the atmosphere which even after more than 50 years lead to a 10 MSv/hr dose and taking in account that the dominating winds are from west to east?

As if you are not death enough from a million degrees Celsius, the enormous over-pressure, the normal direct radiation and the 1000's of tons radioactive soil blow up in the air in case of a normal fission or fusion ground explosion.

Sincerely,
Lesley

BTW IIRC the tank in your avatar was especially designed to survive nearby nuclear blasts...

GarryB wrote:Going the other way with neutron bombs that emit enormous levels of radiation and less kinetic energy so they knock down fewer buildings but irradiate people to much greater distances including those who might have found light cover already.

Neutron bombs are the military equivalent of IMF austerity programs.

They kill the people but leave the buildings standing.

11E wrote:

Why would you bomb the unfriendly neighbours with a weapon blowing huge amounts of Cobalt-60 in the atmosphere which even after more than 50 years lead to a 10 MSv/hr dose and taking in account that the dominating winds are from west to east?

As if you are not death enough from a million degrees Celsius, the enormous over-pressure, the normal direct radiation and the 1000's of tons radioactive soil blow up in the air in case of a normal fission or fusion ground explosion.

Sincerely,
Lesley

If a little cobalt 60 blowing in is a problem then they can use a few thousand conventional nuclear weapons on eastern europe and cobalts on everything else. The bottom line is as long as nato exists it will be hostile.

GarryB wrote:Killing everyone that is part of HATO is not practical because the immediate response will be their attempt to kill everyone in Russia... now if you are Skynet that might sound like a great idea with no bad sides, but for Russia and Russians it would make things rather worse than they are right now... which are actually good.

With Russia's rapidly improving defence systems and the west's decline, I doubt that they could do much in retaliation.

Russia and the United States exchanged data on the number of strategic offensive weapons under START

In September, Russia and the United States exchanged notifications on the number of strategic offensive weapons under the New START. It turned out that part of the American weapons was not indicated in the notification.

“41 B-52H heavy bombers, which were declared converted by the American side, and nuclear warheads counted behind them. 56 launchers of Trident-II SLBMs, which are declared by the American side to be converted. Four silo launchers of ICBMs intended for training, renamed by it into "training mines"," the Russian Foreign Ministry's Telegram channel said in a statement .

The Russian department noted that they could not confirm that the States had indeed rendered these weapons unusable.

Earlier, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov commented on the situation around the Strategic Offensive Arms Treaty with the United States. He expressed hope that the dialogue on the specifics of the START treaty would be maintained. ■

https://tvzvezda-ru.translate.goog/news/202210141742-a6IUT.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-GB&_x_tr_pto=nui

Non-strategic weapons storage and deployment procedures in Russia

Russia has a wide range of nuclear-capable non-strategic delivery systems. This note focuses on air-delivered weapons and on ground-launched road-mobile missiles (whether ballistic or cruise missiles). The key principles of operations, however, remain the same across all nuclear delivery systems. They also appear to apply to weapons assigned to nominally strategic heavy bombers - Tu-95MS and Tu-160.

The description of nuclear weapon storage and deployment procedures is based primarily on the "Lock Them Up: Zero-Deployed Non-Strategic Nuclear Weapons in Europe" report (see an update in this post), the semi-official history of the 12th Main Directorate, Рожденные атомной эрой, and OKSNAR - Fully Assembled State - Soviet Nuclear Weapons in Hungary 1961-1991.

Russia has repeatedly stated that in peacetime all its non-strategic nuclear weapons are "concentrated at centralized storage bases." There are two kinds of facilities that fit that definition---twelve large national-level storage sites and about 35 base-level storage facilities (see the map here). Base-level facilities could contain weapons that are assigned to delivery systems at the base they are collocated with or at other bases in the region. For example, a storage facility known as Kolosovka can store nuclear weapons for all nuclear-capable delivery systems in the Kaliningrad region. Each base-level facility has a "parent" national-level storage site that stores nuclear weapons assigned to the respective base or region. The "parent" national-level storage facility can be separate from the base-level facility by a considerable distance. The Kolosovka site is located more than 1000 km away from its "parent," Vologda-20. In many cases, however, the distance between the sites is smaller.

All weapons that are not mated to their delivery systems are handled by the troops of the 12th Main Directorate of the Ministry of Defense (12 GUMO).

If nuclear weapons are stored at the base-level facility, the standard weapon deployment procedure appears to include several steps that depend on the specific delivery system and the weapon type. In Russia's practice, weapons are stored separately from their delivery vehicles.

The image above shows the arrangements at the Soltsy air base, a base of Tu-22M3 bombers (Image source: Google Earth). The rectangular security perimeter surrounding the nuclear weapon storage facility is seen in the upper left corner of the image. A storage facility on the right side of the image, which is used to store non-nuclear armaments, does not have a similar security perimeter around it.

If the weapons in question are warheads of ballistic or cruise missiles, each of them is stored in a specialized container, only to be mated with the missile as part of the deployment procedure. Gravity bombs are stored in their containers assembled.

Once the units receive an order to bring nuclear delivery systems to a higher state of readiness, the 12 GUMO units must take the weapons, still in containers, out of storage and load them on specialized trucks. When this procedure is completed, the trucks deliver the containers to a designated point, where weapons are removed from containers so they can be mated with their delivery systems.

In the case of air-delivered weapons, such as bombs or ALCMs, this point is normally a designated area of an airbase where the 12 GUMO troops carry out the final assembly of a weapon, if necessary, and prepare it for loading on the delivery aircraft. Fully assembled weapons at the airbase remain in the custody of the 12 GUMO troops until the very moment they are loaded on an aircraft that is ready to take off, at which point the custody is transferred to the aircraft crew.

Warheads of land-based ballistic and cruise missiles could probably be delivered to the missile base. However, the standard procedure appears to involve transporting the warheads to a designated rendezvous point away from the base where they would be mated with missiles and then loaded on launchers. The 12 GUMO troops apparently have the necessary equipment to conduct these operations in the field.

It appears that the 12 GUMO troops can keep nuclear weapons outside of the storage facility for some time, probably days and maybe even weeks. However, at some point the weapons must be returned to the base-level facility that provides conditions for long-term storage.

https://russianforces.org/blog/2022/10/non-strategic_weapons_storage_.shtml

Russian NOTAM´s for the next days.

Propably part of the coming exercises of the Strategic Forces.

A very good article in the Drive on the warheads and payload bus of the R-36M2 with information that they don't know why the Russians have released. These are the first 2 paragraphs. No link to the original TV broadcasts is provided. As usual ignore the comments section.


Russian state media outlets have offered unprecedented looks at the payload bus for the R-36M2 intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, where the weapon's nuclear warheads are housed. Also known as the SS-18 Mod 5 Satan in the West, this missile has a so-called multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle, or MIRV, configuration and has one of the heaviest payloads of any ICBM ever developed and fielded.

Dmitry Kornev, a Russian military expert who runs the blog Military Russia, recently posted stills showing the R-36M2 payload bus on Twitter that were captured from video clips broadcast on the state-run television stations Russia-24 and TV Zvezda. The latter of these is the official television station of the Russian Ministry of Defense. Kornev indicated that the footage has been shown after the first full-scale launch of the RS-28 Sarmat ICBM in April 2022. The RS-28 is expected to eventually replace the R-36M2 in Russian service.




https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/russia-releases-incredibly-detailed-views-of-its-massive-satan-missile

Been hearing talk lately about the need for Russia to conduct a nuclear explosion test which has not been done for decades. Here is another article to that effect and noticed in the Armed Forces news that Putin awarded the head of the 12th Military Department Lab (nuclear weapons research) today.


MOSCOW, February 8. /TASS/. The Novaya Zemlya nuclear testing ground is ready to resume nuclear tests, if need be and given the corresponding political will, Vyacheslav Solovyov, scientific head of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center - All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics, told TASS on Wednesday.

"It is ready," he said, replying to the corresponding question.

As Solovyov explained, "a special program is in effect to maintain the testing site’s readiness."

The Novaya Zemlya nuclear test site is maintained by the Russian Defense Ministry’s 12th Main Department. From September 21, 1955 to October 24, 1990, 130 tests were carried out at the nuclear test site, including 88 atmospheric, three underwater and 39 underground tests.

https://tass.com/defense/1573143

Today's nuclear real tests are a political gesture only.
The last really useful tests were needed to make some observations that computers back then couldn't simulate.
We are talking the early-mid 90s.
Later on, the thing could have been already modeled with supercomputers, which is why a "nuclear test ban" was signed. How nice of them
Doesn't apply to NK of course

No computer model can reproduce reality to arbitrary tolerance levels.   They run fluid dynamics equations for these virtual
bombs and use some model of the nuclear chemistry and heat release.   The bomb itself needs another model where the material
properties of the components are described with pseudo-empirical relations.    Any simulation of physical systems rests on
key elements that are parameterizations.   So there is always fundamental uncertainty.  

If Russia wants to develop new nuclear bombs it will require real world testing.  There is no "end of history" in science and
engineering.