The Moment of Truth: The West Confronts Russian Military Advances
For two years, we in the West have been living in the myth that we will bring Russia to its knees and bring Ukraine into the European Union and the Atlantic Alliance. We will try Vladimir Putin and make Russia pay. Today, this myth is colliding with reality: Moscow now possesses devastating weapons, unparalleled in the West. They make any hope of victory for our coalitions impossible. We will have to acknowledge our mistake. This is not about apologizing for our errors, but about freeing ourselves from them.
On October 26, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chief of Staff, Valery Gerasimov, announced the completion of a project to miniaturize a nuclear reactor and install it on a missile. They reported conducting a test launch of the 9M730 Burevestnik missile, which traveled 14,000 kilometers. The unique feature of this nuclear-powered weapon (which has an unlimited range) is its ability to be guided in such a way as to bypass interceptor sites. This, according to Russian authorities, makes it an unstoppable missile.On October 29, President Putin tested a Status-6 Poseidon torpedo, a nuclear-powered weapon. Throughout the Soviet Union, Eurasian military researchers believed that underwater nuclear explosions could trigger massive tsunamis. To achieve this, they needed to be able to launch torpedoes much farther than was possible at the time, in order to avoid the cataclysms they intended to unleash. This has now been accomplished.
Mega-tsunamis could devastate cities like Washington, D.C., or New York City, or even naval groups like those of the U.S. aircraft carriers. However, the Poseidon torpedo is significantly longer than others: 21 meters. It cannot be launched from operational submarines and required its own dedicated vessel for launch. Its ability to operate underwater almost indefinitely more than compensates for this limitation. In any case, this torpedo ensures that Russia can launch a second strike in the event of a US attack. Until now, the first to launch a nuclear strike was guaranteed to cripple its enemy’s main means of retaliation. No weapon is ever truly definitive. Each exists within a continuum of technological advancements; each is superseded by another; and each eventually encounters effective defenses or predators. But for the moment, there seems to be no answer to these weapons, any more than there is to Russian supersonic missiles.In about twenty years, Russia has acquired a whole host of new weapons that surpass all Western technologies.
I explained in “Under Our Eyes” that Russia agreed to come to Syria’s aid in 2012, but only established a presence there at the end of 2015. For nearly three years, it had been determined to develop new weapons and had come to test them in the Levant. I was able to observe that it possessed prodigious capabilities, far surpassing the prowess of the United States during the Cold War. Of course, these weapons, being only prototypes, were extremely rare, but everyone already understood that Western dominance was nothing more than an illusion.
For example, Russia possessed the capability to disconnect NATO orders from its own weapons. This wasn’t a form of jamming; the weapons simply stopped responding to commands. Since some observers doubted its effectiveness, Russia extended this system to all of Syria. And because it operated within a circular area, it partially extended it, for two days, to Lebanon, Iraq, and Turkey. No civilian aircraft were able to fly. Subsequently, they installed this weapon in Kaliningrad and in the Black Sea.
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