If you are wondering about the title of today’s poast, it has to do with the announcement just yesterday by the Neo-Tsar at Valdai, that Russia has successfully tested the 9M370 Burestvenik (Бурественик – literally, “Stormy Petrel”) nuclear-powered, nuclear-capable cruise missile.
Why is this a big deal? Because, IF TRUE – and I have no reason to believe it is false – then it puts the Russian Armed Forces a full two generations ahead of the FUSA in terms of strategic and tactical stand-off weapons.
This is an arms race the FUSA lost, a long time ago. The Russians already have actively demonstrated hypersonic stand-off weapons – their Kh-47M Kinzhal air-launched quasi-ballistic hypersonic strike weapon can now be fired from multiple launch platforms, while their 3M22 Tsirkon ship-launched air-breathing hypersonic missle can now sink carrier battle groups at ranges far beyond their ability to resist.
That is before we get to the RS-28 Sarmat, which carries multiple Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles and has the ability to come in behind American ballistic missile defences.
The new Burestvenik, when it enters service, will essentially invalidate and completely nullify whatever missile defences NATO has. This is a strike weapon with, effectively, unlimited range, which can strike anywhere, anytime.
I happen to have a minor passing interest in the testing of Burestvenik. Back in August 2019, when I was in Moscow on one of my many trips to the city, there was a nuclear accident near the far northern Russian city of Arkhangelsk. At least five people died, and as many as six were injured to varying degrees of severity.
The Russians later revealed the explosion was due to the failure of a test attempt of an isotope power source for a liquid-fuelled rocket engine – however, that only made sense if the rocket in question had a nuclear power source.
It is remarkable to see that, within four years, the Russians have gone from what was probably a failed test of this very same missile platform, to what they claim was a successful test of the same. If they are telling the truth – and, again, I see no reason to think otherwise, for the moment – then they have completely upended the strategic calculus.
The American doctrine of nuclear deterrence used to rest on “Mutually Assured Destruction” (I have seen the “M” in “MAD” referred to as “Massive”, too). The idea was, the moment one side loosed nuclear weapons, the other side would do the same, on an even greater scale, thereby wiping out both sides, resulting in a sort of “grim trigger strategy” stalemate, in game theoretic terms.
St. Reagan of the Right – Ronaldus Magnus himself – changed that calculus fundamentally with his Strategic Defence Initiative programme. His critics derided it as Star Wars, but in the Kremlin, they assuredly were not laughing.
At the time, the strategic planners of the Soviet General Staff realised pretty quickly that, IF the SDI came to fruition, it would result in a missile defence system that could not stop a Soviet first strike…
… but COULD stop a Soviet retaliatory strike, in the event of an American first strike.
This led the Soviets to pour VAST quantities of money into crash-development programmes for new weapons. Among those was the MiG 1.41 prototype fifth-generation fighter, which never went beyond the test stage before the collapse of the USSR, but even today has features that rival those of the F-22, and the Su-47 Berkhut forward-swept fighter.
The Soviets bankrupted themselves trying to catch up, after they lost the strategic initiative, and shortly afterwards collapsed.
How ironic, then, that we see the same thing now playing out in reverse. Today, it is the FUSA that is the declining and decaying empire, rapidly collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions – and it is Russia that is rising once again, reclaiming its confidence and sense of self, and building weapons systems without equal on Earth.
This is the Great Game, playing out on the largest field imaginable – and the West, remarkably, is losing.
And on such a happy note, let us end the geopolitical musings for the day, and get straight to the good stuff.
This week’s lovely lady is someone named Susanna Schoen, of indeterminate age but probably in her early 20s, from Krautland. She does… well, I have no idea, really, but apparently it has something to do with modelling. While she does have a bit of an epic case of RBF, the rest of her pretty much makes up for it.
Happy Friday, boys, enjoy your weekend.
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