So COOL! We need a 4th leg to the Nuclear Triad !!

[Anomalocaris]

From Newsweek:

http://www.newsweek.com/russia-drones-nu...eak-781075


Capabilities are impressive, but imagine what the US could come up with in regards to a device that could 'swim' up Russian rivers and hit deeper targets than their 'blunderbuss' device and we could use a much smaller warhead, thus encouraging their deployment!!

Thank you Mr. Putin, we need a new big military project to really heat up the economy, and a FOURTH leg to our nuclear triad will fill the bill nicely !!!!!


Trump will cream his shorts over this with out the help of any $100,000 hookers with this princely Putin present !!!

Advanced WWI technology known as anti-submarine nets will keep unmanned submersibles of doom from swimming up rivers.

The point of the Russian weapons is it offers a means of nuclear retaliation that ballistic missile Defence can not hope to address.  It offers absolutely no advantages of any kind as a first strike weapon.  It is therefore purely a out of the box response to the ballistic missile Defence, and as such is more a tool fore the preservation of the stats quo rather than an escalation.

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Good, let them go broke pursuing an illusory "advantage".

They are hardly pursuing an advantage with this.   There is nothing this weapon can do that a normal nuclear ballistic or cruise missile can’t vastly faster and more reliably.   It’s only distinction is it bypasses ballistic missile Defence.  

The Russians since the Cold War days have ways overestimated American technological prowess and the potential for american ballistic missile Defence to nullify the efficacy of the vast russian investment in ICBMs as one of the critical underpinning of russian strategic importance in EuroAsia and assurance against a nuclear first strike.   Since the end of the Cold War, russian conventional military strength has declined to below those of many of russia’s Neighbors and russian capacity to re-establish and maintain conventional parity with NATO and China is gone beyond recall.   The fleet of ICBMs is now Russia’s only hard power backing for preventing further erosions of its regional influence by other great powers.  So nullifying ballistic missile Defence is more vital now than ever for Russia.

This unmanned submersible of doom is merely an out of the box effort to nullify any advantage ballistic missile Defence might have conferred to their nuclear opponents.

In a way, this submersible is an ideal asymmetrical solution to the self-perceived strategic dilemma that the economically impoverished Russia finds herself in.   The submersible has no need for speed.  This second strike weapon doesn’t have to contend with the physics of exo-atmospheric flight.  It has no need to evade patrolling fighters or surface to air missiles.  It could move silently along just fast enough to have steerage way, say 3-5 knots, leaving almost no wake or acoustic signature. It might even be blue to leverage emerging technology to propel unmanned autonomous submersible vehicle using no sound producing propellers or any external rapidly moving parts at all.   The propulsion will come purely from chemical means of altering buoyancy and fins to convert slow up and down movements of the vehicle to forward motion.   With technology barely more sophisticated than those that can be found on any commerical $1000 camera drone, it can pin point its location and navigate unerringly, but slowly and undetectably, towards its target.   It’s cost would be a tiny fraction of those of a full fledged manned submarine that might be send to patrol against its approach.  A reasonable sized unmanned submersible can carry a far larger payload than a typical ICBM, cruise missile, or manned bomber. A submersible designed to carry a 100 ton warshead would still be small compared to any manned submariner.   So it can make up for its inability to directly attack inshore targets with the ability to carry a large, multi-ton multi-stage thermal nuclear device capable of devasting areas a considerably distance inshore.  The cost of protecting both exposed coasts of the US against this kind of the silent slow creeping submersible must be several orders of magnitude greater than the cost of these submersibles.