The INF treaty is a great loss, people don't understand (neither does trump) why its loss makes things do dangerous.
The funny thing is that the only people who think it is a great loss should be the europeans...
When it was agreed it was a terrible deal for Russia... they had to get rid of a lot of excellent missiles they had in service... almost 2,000 weapons were withdrawn, while for NATO America had to withdraw about 800 missiles to comply.
The missiles in question were very destabilising because the flight time for these weapons was very short to Moscow... it didn't effect flight time to Washington, so it was really about the Soviets having to operate on a hair trigger being able to decide something was something or not in the space of 5 minutes 24/7.
There were plenty of close calls, but fortunately cool heads were in charge... so for instance one time when a radar detected an enormous group of enemy missiles coming over the horizon... when there was no information about Soviet missile launches and Soviet radio communication was normal so they decided it was a glitch.... it turned out the radar detected the moon coming up but that the system was not designed for that number of digits so it shifted the decimal place to something that appeared threatening...
The fact is that the Soviets had S-300P and S-300V missiles widely in service at the time but nothing like the air defence capacity to stop even a relatively small IRBM attack because even at the time the only ABM systems were the one around Moscow that might or might not stop smaller lower flying missiles, and the S-300s around the place that could knock down some of them but not all.
IRBMs created a situation where full scale nuclear war could go at any time with 5 minutes warning so you had less than 3 minutes to decide to respond or if it was a mistake.
The INF treaty made sense.
Today with the Russian IADS with missiles and aircraft and radars and systems... the S-400 could easily shoot down anything the INF treaty bans and the S-500 will expand that capability to include ICBMs and SLBMs.. The Russians are in a good position in terms of air defence.
The US... doesn't give a shit... its forces there have SAMs protecting them but the rest of the EU is not well protected at all.
With the INF treaty gone the Russians can now save a lot of money developing hypersonic cruise missiles that can have cheap truck launchers and also smaller ballistic missiles to engage enemy targets that are not 10,000km away saving a lot of money and using their weapons much more efficiently... instead of having 1,500 warheads according to the new Start treaty with perhaps 500 of those warheads pointed at Brussels and the UK and France and Germany and Japan and South Korea, they can now point all of them at the US and use shorter ranged cheaper missiles against the other targets.
For the US it means it can use ballistic missiles regionally against China and Iran and now Russia where before Iran and China could aim them at US forces in their regions but US forces had nothing to point back... except all the airforce cruise missiles and ship based cruise missiles...
For Europe the loss of the INF treaty is devastating and means now they are going to have to either spend trillions of dollars developing a HATO wide air defence system, or just accept they will be more vulnerable to a Russian attack than Iraq was vulnerable to US attack in 1991... where there defences were obliterated overnight...
Anyone would think the INF treaty would be fundamental to HATO security, but the US didn't give a shit and the entire EU didn't care that they didn't care... HATO countries directly effected like Germany even had the balls to blame Russia...
An IRBM or Hypersonic missile can hit a target in a very short time. For example #1 target for Russian forces is all the ABM sites so in times of high tension, they would nuke those to safegurad their ICBMs, its possible they can take them out with non-nuke Iksanders if they are willing to minimise tension, but if they think a first strike is being attemped by "you know who" they would nuke Poland and Romanian ABM sites.
Well whether it works or not an ABM system in Poland or Romania are direct threats to Russias nuclear deterrent and place the nuclear crosshair right on those two countries straight away... one of the first things to be priority targeted... but their people are stupid and Russophobic and when they get nuked it will be Russias fault of course.
The missile flight time is so short there is no recall or chance to second guess. If you get a Russian leader that is less steely eyed then Putin ..it could be EXTEREMLY dangerous. Also command and control becomes a nightmare and accidental or renagade weapons launch becomes a huge risk. These are extremely dangerous times.
Well the amusing thing is that the velocity of a ballistic weapon is largely dependent on its range... the longer its range the faster it has to go up and the faster it comes down on target... but with manouvering hypersonic missiles with scramjet propulsion they can actually go a lot faster...
Without manouvering a mach 7-8 missile like Iskander could probably go mach 9 or 10 and travel maybe 1,000km instead of 500km.
It is worth reducing the range because manouvering makes them much harder to intercept... but with no restrictions on range it actually becomes rather interesting... a scramjet cruise missile with a solid rocket terminal phase makes sense because in the terminal phase you want max energy... that is what a Rocket does... the cruise period with a scramjet means high speed but more efficient fuel use to maximise range... best of both worlds... but who has the working scramjet powered missiles and hypersonic manouvering missiles in service?
The ABM sites in eastern europe are easy targets. They could be taken out even by MRLS if they have enough range. Nukes are useless for that.
Nukes send a message... and you could use the 2KT nuke from a 152mm artillery shell... 50kgs and small... and able to obliterate the entire ABM site... with one shot.
The will be defended by anti-missile missles, and you need a heavy missile as they are in silos
What you need is a nonballistic missile to penetrate the ballistic missile defences... something like Iskander or Zircon would be fine... in fact in the 1980s the SS-20 would have been a good choice too with a manouvering hypersonic munition as a payload...
They could also use newest kh59 which is smaller than kalibr and much more stealthy. West has nothing to protect against cruise missiles and certainly not against stealthy ones.
Indeed... the INF treaty is gone and while the Saudis are getting ass raped with drones and cruise missiles and of course HATO has a wide range of low flying stealthy cruise missiles for the job too, they are not smart enough to put two and two together and realise they are horribly vulnerable to a method they use themselves... for which the Russians have taken the last 40 odd years to develop solutions to... which means they are probably no where near as vulnerable to such attacks as HATO is right now.
Dunno why this is all in the Akula thread though...
Well the Akula could launch the supersonic member of the Club family from its 650mm torpedo tubes that would fly subsonically about 1,500km to the ABM site and them roar in at mach 2.9 and obliterate the radars and launchers with a single nuclear blast...
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