Russia has unveiled chilling pictures of its largest ever nuclear missile, capable of destroying an area the size of France.
The RS-28 Sarmat missile, dubbed Satan 2 by Nato, has a top speed of 4.3 miles (7km) per second and has been designed to outfox anti-missile shield systems.
The new Sarmat missile could deliver warheads of 40 megatons - 2,000 times as powerful as the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is reportedly planning to replace the country's older SS-18 Satan weapons with the new missiles amid a string of recent disagreements with the West.
The RS-28 Sarmat missile is said to contain 16 nuclear warheads and is capable of destroying an area the size of France or Texas, according to Russian news network Zvezda, which is owned by Russia's ministry of defence.
The weapon is also able to evade radar.
It is expected to have a range of 6,213 miles (10,000 km), which would allow Moscow to attack London and other European cities as well as reaching cities on America's west and east coasts.
The Sarmat has been specifically designed to defeat the US’s Anti Ballistic Missile systems, which are being deployed in eastern Europe.
Its range of countermeasures is classified and not known. However it is believed the Sarmat is capable of manoeuvres during its flight trajectory to confuse incoming missiles, that it is able to launch decoys – also to confuse incoming interceptor missiles – and that at least one of the warheads being designed for it is a hypersonic warhead, which rumours say was tested successfully in April, and which is believed to be impervious to interception by incoming missiles.
A little mentioned fact about the military strategic balance between the US and Russia, is that Russia has been steadily upgrading its strategic deterrent with new advanced missiles, which are entirely different to those of the 1960s, which formed the basis of the Soviet strategic deterrent.
These include the Topol and Yars light road mobile solid fuel ICBMs, and the very advanced solid fuelled Bulava ICBM, which is sea launched from Russia’s advanced Borei strategic nuclear missile submarines. (Below)
By contrast the US strategic deterrent still relies on missile systems such as the ground-based Minuteman III and the sea launched Trident II, which have their origins in the 1960s and early 1970s.
With the Sarmat missile, which is supposed to enter service in 2018, the Russians will add another powerful modern advanced system to their strategic armoury.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has issued a veiled threat to Hillary Clinton, saying his country will engage in “confrontation” with the US if she continues to provoke the Motherland, according to a new report.
Putin, 64, accused the Democratic presidential nominee of putting forth continued “harsh rhetoric” and “threats” against Russia for her own political gain, The Daily Star reported.
“Jeopardizing Russian-American relations in order to gain brownie points internally – I consider this to be harmful and counterproductive, Putin recently told reporters in Russia.
“It’s not funny anymore. If somebody out there wants confrontation. This is not our choice but this means that there will be problems,” Putin warned.
The former KGB spy added that Clinton was trying “to distract [American] voters from the country’s problems” by unifying voters against two common enemies – Russia and Iran.
And Putin made no secret over who he favors in the Nov. 8 election.
“Mrs. Clinton has chosen to take up a very aggressive stance against our country, against Russia. Mr. Trump, on the other hand, calls for cooperation – at least when it comes to the international fight against terrorism,” Putin said.
“Naturally we welcome those who would like to cooperate with us. And we consider it wrong, that we always have to be in conflict with one another, creating existential threats for each other and for the whole world,” Putin noted.
The chilling video has earned an eye-popping 1.3 million views in the last few days.
Across Russia, 40 million civilians and military personnel just finished up emergency drills aimed at preparing the general population for nuclear or chemical-weapons attacks, The Wall Street Journal's Thomas Grove reports.
Video shows Russian civilians practicing along with officials and workers in hazardous-material protective suits.
But as troubling as the largest civil defense drills since the height of the Cold War have been, the steps Russia has taken to improve its offensive nuclear capabilities likely overshadow them.
Since the breakdown of US-Russia talks on the fate of Syria, Russia has pulled out of a nuclear-nonproliferation agreement with the US, citing "unfriendly acts" by America. It has moved nuclear-capable missiles to its European enclave of Kaliningrad, and threatened "asymmetrical" and "painful" actions against the US should it decide to impose sanctions on Russia over Syria.
Additionally, Russia's state-run media has been ratcheting up anti-American rhetoric.
Lev Gudkov, head of the Russian polling group Levada-Center, told The Journal that in Russia "most people believe that the Third World War has begun, but right now we are still in the cold phase of the war, which may or may not turn into a hot war."
In Syria and the Ukraine, Russia has turned away from diplomacy and toward military solutions to standoffs with the West. Russia's recent installation of another missile defense battery in Syria gives the US very few options to intervene without risking serious casualties.
Further, Russia designed its nuclear weapons arsenal as absolute doomsday devices that rain up to 10 high-yield nuclear warheads down on targets at Mach 23 in a salvo that the US can't possibly hope to intercept.
The US has long relied on the doctrine of "mutually assured destruction" — that is, having a spread-out, autonomous, and effective nuclear arsenal that would return fire should another nuclear power attack — with the intent of deterring any nuclear attacks. But sources told The Journal that Moscow is now taking steps to ensure that 100% of its population would be sheltered from such an attack.
The most important ecological crisis of the world has ever seen has been underway since March 11th, 2011, yet there is nary a mention of it in the corporate media, and no political body in the world is championing its resolution.
The media, politicians and the world at large seem to be engaging in extreme denial regarding Fukushima. A survey of mainstream media coverage of the fallout of this event reveals the trend of covering this story as a human interest affair, not as the immediate threat it truly is.
The effects on nature are already being seen, yet even among the environmentalist factions of media, there is strong denial of the damage already done and of what is to come as the crisis approaches its sixth year. Some 300 tons of radioactive water are dumped into the Pacific Ocean each day, and signs are showing that this catastrophe is gravely affecting sea-life and wildlife in and around the Pacific.
Russia could shoot down a U.S. aircraft if a no-fly zone were imposed over Syria, National Intelligence Director James Clapper said Tuesday.
"I wouldn't put it past them to shoot down an American aircraft if they felt that was threatening to their forces on the ground," Clapper said, speaking with CBS' Charlie Rose at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York about several national security issues.
Russia has deployed a very advanced and capable air defense system in Syria and would not have done that if it wouldn't use it, Clapper said.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has called for a no-fly zone over parts of Syria. Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence has also called for a no-fly zone over Syria, but Donald Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, has yet to take a firm position.
Something dramatic happened last Friday in Rome and slowly,slowly we are starting to decipher it. A vast, silent mass of hundreds of Muslim faithful gathered to pray in front of Rome’s Coliseum.
They chose a symbol of Western culture and did so under the wise guidance of political Imams. This was not an Islam respectful of the secular and democratic nature of Italian institutions. It was the political branch of an Islam that does not separate state and mosque, the Muslim Brotherhood, whose slogan has never changed since the time of Hassan al-Banna: “Allah is our goal, the Prophet our leader, the Koran our law, the jihad our way, dying for the way of Allah is our greatest hope”.
That spectacular Islamic mass was like a refusal of the illusion of a cultural “peace” slowly being strangled and punctuated with Koranic invocations. Something similar had already happened in front of Milan’s main cathedral and Bologna’s church of San Petronio, the target of Islamic fundamentalism because of a fresco by Giovanni da Modena that depicts Mohammed among the damned, in accordance with Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Islamists aim at a pedagogy that is not afraid of using words based on strength honor, faith and war. That mass prayer means that it is not possible to turn Muslims into liberal secularists. That Muslims could be assimilated to a secular environment.
Rome’s prayer was part of the acculturation of Europe’s Muslims, understood as “dar al shaada,” a land of religious mission by Islamist organizations. The purpose of prayer was to advance loyalty to the Prophet. It was pure Islamic, their concept of “the solution”.
We lack the will and fear abounds.
Rome’s prayer was not a “peaceful” rally, although there was no violence.
It was not a manifestation of freedom of conscience, it was not the modern exercise of religious freedom. It was a declaration of cultural war, the deadly encirclement of Western secularism.
The well-known preacher Yussuf al Qaradawi said that the day will come when Rome will be Islamized. It remains to decide whether it will “by the word or by the sword”. Last Friday’s prayer it was by the word, while ISIS released videos in which the Coliseum is burned and bombed.
The American philosopher Lee Harris said a most important thing: The glory of the West has been the eradication of the virus of fanaticism, but perhaps we have achieved it at the price of our defeat.
The multicultural paradox, of which Rome’s mass prayer was another manifestation, looks like this: We are afraid of each other and we try to flatter, we do not know ourselves so we don’t see our enemy’s goals.
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