"Poseidon" Nuclear-armed Underwater Drone

The Russians have said the weapon is difficult to defeat, they didn't claim it was stealthy and invisible.

A decapitation attack is to kill the enemy leadership (both parties) and to also deal a blow to their nuclear capacity, so ICBM fields and SSBN subs and their air bases with their strategic bomber aircraft.

Apart from their SSBNs those other targets are not something Poseidon would be any good at attacking.

Russia has never bothered with first strike weapons, decapitation strikes are what the west is all about.

Poseidon and Thunderbird are revenge weapons to kill the enemy after the conflict is over and to create a lasting damage that makes recovery slow and painful.

I strongly suspect that the Russians likely have non-strategic uses in mind for Poseidon, not just as a counter-force doomsday weapon.

eg as long range spy UUVs to penetrate enemy sea-space and perform tasks such as SIGINT and scoping out enemy detection capabilities and reaction times. The key indicator is that Belgorod carries both Poseidons and a moonpool arrangement ostentiably for hosting a deep-water spy sub such as Losharik, but which could equally be used to recover Poseidons returning from mission.

Belgorod may therefore be intended as a spy-mother ship, carrying Poseidons across ocean expanses to their release locations, deploying them, then recovering them on mission completion.

This seems sensible to me, and is consistent with the Belgorod design (which otherwise, doesn't really make a lot of sense, as stated by many so-called "analysts").

Nukes stationed in orbit is a horrendously bad idea. What do you do when the satellite hosting the nukes goes offline because of onboard failure, or just simply becoming unreliable due to exceeding its design life? In the former scenario you have a nuke warhead in orbit over which you have no control, while in the 2nd you either re-enter the effected warhead(s) over friendly territory (itself a risky endeavour) or else risk an escalation to scenario 1.

No, its a bad idea.

Belgorod may therefore be intended as a spy-mother ship, carrying Poseidons across ocean expanses to their release locations, deploying them, then recovering them on mission completion.

Anti sub technology is expensive... I would say that the Belgorods most appealing feature would be at a time of tension it could sail to the southern oceans... south pacific and south atlantic.... middle of nowhere... and just sail around changing depths and direction and just really getting lost... when ordered to launch it could fire its weapons rather rapidly and they would zip away at the sort of speed that no following sub or ship could really deal with using conventional weapons, but the point is that sending sophisticated subs or surface vessels let alone a carrier group to follow these subs would be expensive and you lose them and you probably wont find them again without dedicating a lot of resources.

It could be used to attack western sub bases at times when the most western SSBNs are in port, or it could nuke the sonar beds they use to track Russian subs, though they are largely non functional now AFAIK.

I think using them as a drone does not make a lot of sense in the same way that I think using Sarmat as a satellite launcher would not be a great idea... a more conventional... more disposable and cheaper drone could be used instead of a super doomsday nuclear powered weapon.

Its not about actually doing a first strike, its about the ability to do and deliver a threat to the US homeland that mirrors the threat the US is directing to Moscow. Tsirkon equipped Poseidon or nukes in space would do that.

I think you are ignoring their massive ego... even with such things in place they will have no idea they are there so it wont effect them at all, and if somehow it was revealed and confirmed defence mode will suddenly be applied... stupid Russian weapons will fail to work properly against super US made space defence forces that will save us from everything...

The Russians have had Kh-101s and Calibres for decades and the west really didn't notice them till they started using them in Syria... they have had Kh-32s and Kh-22s for a very long time and they just pretend they wont be very accurate, or their SAMs will just shoot them down etc etc etc.

The media will only tell them when the US MIC wants more money to develop a counter.

IMHO nukes in space would not really be that expensive. as you can just modify the software on the avangard gliders.

The problem there is that nukes in space would be easy to deal with... most anti satellite weapons should be able to destroy them... and when they do they will have to take out all Russian satellites just in case they have nukes... which means earth orbit becomes a fragmentation storm that will wipe out all satellites eventually...

When the risk to the USA matches the risk to Russia then we are at detente again.

The Americans don't see any other country as its equal... they will come up with something that will save the day... their economy is broken and they are fighting Russia and want to fight with China... they are delusional... it is best to step back and let them destroy themselves... no need to attract their attention... that is a chainsaw they are swinging and they don't care who they get with it.

The US believes that Russian subs can be tracked and defeated if necessary as they are large and have a significant heat sig.

The public might think that, but the military people who are closer to the front line than the political power lunches know better.

No, its a bad idea.

Did you see Space Cowboys too?

Stupid movie.

Not when it comes to nukes, they will freak out like they did when Russian missiles showed up in cuba

They over reacted in Cuba and would probably have tried to invade if there was no talking.

Those FROG rockets on the beaches all had nuclear warheads to repel a large scale D Day like invasion force... it would have been a massacre.

the US and West have many satellites if they take out the Russian sats its war anyway and the satellite collateral damage would be too great

Yeah, the Americans are not good at thinking things through before acting... look at their history of invasions the last few decades.

America does have a great ability to reinvent itself. The US military are a bunch of sycophants that only deliver good news.

The military is only part of the puzzle, it is the politicians and the private military companies that are a huge part of the puzzle too.

The system does not work without corrupt politicians giving contracts, and military men getting jobs in the private sector specifically because of their position and their ability to get future contracts from the people under them that they trained for their job when they left...

If they had open and free testing and evaluation of systems and equipment, American stuff wouldn't make the top ten.

A lot of the stuff they do use is foreign anyway, but produced locally like the FN MAG machine guns and their tank armour, and their tank guns.

A nuclear warhead in a satellite is like having nuclear warheads sitting in ships off the enemy coast ready to launch at a moments notice using speed to defeat being intercepted.

The problem is that nuclear weapons in ships would be easy for someone to sneak on board and tamper or steal or just disable what you have.

With a satellite it would be rather easy to put something on a collision course to damage it.

And that ignores natural things hitting it from space which is also a very real possibility too.

There are a number of things that could go wrong, and lots of fail safes you might have to stop it being captured that might turn into a problem.

I mentioned Space Cowboys which was a terrible US movie about old US programmers that had to be reactivated and sent into space because it turns out the Russians in the 1990s had a satellite armed with nuclear missiles that were portrayed as ICBMs inside the satellite despite the fact that they didn't have to launch them off the ground and something much smaller would have done. The story is that the Russians are so stupid they copied US programming to make the satellite because they are too dumb to make their own and no one in Russia understands the programming and only geriatrics from the US space programme can save the day and help out those commies by saving the world again.

American bullshit as usual and totally annoying, but shows what position you might get yourself into if there is a problem and it starts activating or it crashes somewhere...

The satellite was decaying and it was programmed to initiate an attack if it was leaving orbit which was a problem after they had lost the cold war and everyone was friends.

Ironically the solution was to fire the rockets that would not be needed in their primary role to hit targets in the west and send the problem to the moon.

Absolute crap story telling... but showing it is something that Russia really does not need, and ironically would be something the Americans probably already have.

Another issue with warheads in orbit is that their terminal velocity as they approach the target is going to be very low, as their speed is only developed by a "short" fall from LEO, say 300-400kms altitude. In comparison, an ICBM begins its fall at its apogee which can be up to 4,500 kms, and can reach up to M24 or 8 km/sec when they hit the atmosphere.

Not great, especially given the recent advances in ABM tech...

Good point but to be in orbit then they need to be actually going at orbital speeds which makes them faster than many ICBMs which don't get fast enough to leave orbit, but if you want your in orbit object to land in a specific place along its orbital path you deorbit something by slowing them down... with something like a space shuttle with a large surface area the angle and speeds are critical... ironically slowing down too much leads to a near vertical descent during which your craft would burn up... conversely not slowing down enough will lead to the object skipping off the atmosphere and back up into space, but with a reentry vehicle you tend to want to go in steep which means slowing down a lot because you come in near vertically and while that means you do speed up it does mean you get better control of where you actually hit.

Deorbiting big heavy satellites and space stations is inaccurate because they can break up and they come in at a relatively shallow angle so they could land over a wide area... they tend to aim for the south east pacific ocean which is largely empty most of the time.

I strongly suspect that the Russians likely have non-strategic uses in mind for Poseidon, not just as a counter-force doomsday weapon.

I honestly don't think they will adapt the Poseidon into an anti carrier weapon, but only for the same reason I don't think they will adapt the newest ICBMs they have to anti carrier roles either.

Poseidons are more valuable in the role they were designed for.

They, of course can develop UUVs to hunt western ships of all sizes and shapes.

They have the very large UUV Surrogat-V that is supposed to operate with submarines, the Vityaz-D which explored the Marianas trench system... so we know it can go deep.

This video is rather interesting, they talk about training ships for hunting subs and talk about how Russian subs are not like western subs and of course this sort of thing takes the Russian sub away from duties, so drone subs are being used to mimic western subs for the training... which in my opinion raises opportunities for operating near enemy forces by pretending to be a friendly. Arming the drones would be rather interesting too...



Surrogate-V is 17m long and 40 tons in weight and fully powered by Lithium Ion batteries... its design was handed to the Russian military but they are revising it and improving it...

The military realised if it can pretend to be western subs for Russian practise then it can pretend to be a Russian sub as a decoy when engaging western forces...

All in the vid.