Russia has successfully tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile that is capable of launching nuclear warheads anywhere across the globe, but the Pentagon has said it is not a threat to the United States or its allies.
In a televised address following the missile's reported launch on Wednesday (April 20), Russian President Vladmir Putin boasted that the missile, officially called the RS-28 Sarmat and nicknamed "Satan II" by NATO, had no equivalents anywhere in the world and would make adversaries "think twice" before making threats against Russia.
But just how much does the diabolically nicknamed missile add to Russia’s nuclear threat? First introduced by Putin in a 2018 state-of-the-nation address as the "next generation" of nuclear missile technology, the Sarmat missile is 116 feet (35.3 meters) long, and weighs 220 tons (200 metric tons).
The Sarmat missile was developed to replace Russia’s current intercontinental ballistic missile — the aging Sovet-era R-36 or Voevoda, dubbed "Satan" by NATO — which could be made into a MIRV of up to 10 light warheads. In addition, the new missile has an estimated range between 6,200 and 11,180 miles (10,000 to 18,000 km), an improvement over the Voevoda’s range of 6,340 to 9,940 miles(10,200 to 16,000 km), according to the U.S. Center for Strategic and International studies (CSIS).
In Wednesday's test, Russia said that the Sarmat was launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, and that its "practice warheads" hit designated targets at the Kura Missile Test Range on the Kamchatka Peninsula, Defense News reported. After the test, Putin said that the missile "is capable of overcoming all modern means of anti-missile defense." He also emphasized that Sarmat's parts are made exclusively domestically, which he says will make its mass production "easier and accelerate the process of providing it for [Russia's] Strategic Missile Force."
Comparing silo-based rockets alone, the new Russian rocket looks formidable. It can launch a maximum payload with a yield of roughly 50 megatons of TNT compared with the U.S. Minuteman III, which fires a maximum payload of 1.425 megatons, according to the CSIS. Of equal concern is Russia's claimed hypersonic capacity, which means it is able to accelerate some missiles faster than Mach 5 (3,836 miles per hour) on their way to their targets. Right now, both Russia and China claim to have missiles with hypersonic capacities in service.
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