Can Russia REALLY wipe out Britain with a '1,000ft-high tsunami'? Experts say Putin's Poseidon nuke COULD destroy a coastal city

Can Russia REALLY wipe out Britain with a '1,000ft-high tsunami'? Experts say Putin's Poseidon nuke COULD destroy a coastal city, cause radioactive floods and kill millions in London

By RACHAEL BUNYAN FOR MAILONLINE

A towering 1,000ft radioactive tsunami crashes into British shores pulverising everything in sight and reducing entire cities to desolate wastelands. 

This is the chilling image conjured by Russia's ranting propagandists as they boast of the devastating power of Putin's most fearsome weapon - an underwater doomsday torpedo named Poseidon.

Since Putin invaded Ukraine, his propagandists have continued to threaten the UK with a nuclear holocaust - and the rhetoric has continued to escalate in recent months. Just yesterday, retired Russian general Yevgeny Buzhinsky urged Putin to launch Poseidon - still said to be in testing - that he said would destroy Britain.

And now, international military experts have warned that Putin's underwater torpedo could indeed destroy the UK's coastal cities, cause radioactive floods and kill millions of people in London.

While the experts deny Russia's claims that Poseidon would result in such monstrously high 1,000ft waves - around the height of the Eiffel Tower - or that it would destroy the entire country, they say that the effects of such a nuclear strike would still be 'devastating'.

If Russia launched the Poseidon from its 'doomsday' submarine and the torpedo exploded in the Thames estuary, for instance, a tidal wave would erupt from the water's surface and destroy London, the academics say. 

'If the Poseidon is armed a large megaton warhead it would undoubtedly cause damage,' Professor Andrew Futter, a University of Leicester academic and nuclear weapons expert, tells MailOnline.

'If a large nuclear device were detonated in or near that Thames estuary, the tide in the Thames could surge towards buildings and millions of people could potentially die in the blast. There would be a lot of damage. The reality is that a large megaton blast, even in the water, would be very destructive.

'The immediate worry wouldn't be about radiation because a huge number of people would killed by the blast, shockwave or burns, first.'

Futter added: 'It's possible that it would leave the Thames irradiated, but there'd be so few people left alive in central London that it wouldn't really make a great deal of difference.'

Dr. Rod Thornton, a security expert at King's College London, says that the Poseidon torpedo would 'wipe out' any cities close to the explosion, whether it be London or New York in the US.

Thornton says that if the Poseidon exploded just off the coast of south-east England, thousands of people along the coast could be killed from the nuclear explosion itself. He explains that the tidal wave would be bigger if Poseidon was launched in deeper waters. 

Thornton says that if Russia launched the Poseidon from a submarine in the middle of the North Sea, it 'would create a fairly 'small' tsunami'.

'But the wave, if it it swamped London, would kill everyone there. It would wipe out the city,' Thornton says. 'And the same wave might kill everyone in all channel ports in the UK and France - and maybe even as far as Rotterdam.'

Last year, Russian propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov, a man often known as 'Putin's mouthpiece', urged Putin to wipe the UK off the map with the Poseidon underwater drone while standing in front of a background graphic showing the UK being erased by a giant wave. 

More...