Quote:
Originally Posted by renormalised
Gary, sounds like the old Cold War sabre rattling is back in business again, from what you've posted there. When will they ever learn!!!!
Sounds like they're trying to get the Bulava to be the counterpoint missile to the Trident and it's not working out so well for them. One wonders when the Americans and others will start developing new systems themselves.
|
Hi Carl,
In 1999, the United States passed into public law what is called the "National
Missile Defence Act". In a nutshell it states that the policy of the United States is
to deploy a missile defense system capable of defending the United States
against a limited ballistic missile attack as soon as technologically possible.
This system is known as the "Ballistic Missile Defence System" (BDMS)
and is a successor to the Reagan era "Strategic Defence Initiative" (SDI), better
known as the "Star Wars program".
What Bulava is mostly about is a delivery system for the Russians that will
circumvent the BDMS defence shield. It attempts to do this in a number
of ways, including by providing shielding and hardening against a variety
of countermeasures including laser strike, EM pulse and nuclear blast
as well as adds randomness to its flight path by pulsing its engines
in the final stages of flight before delivering MIRV warheads to the targets.
Each of the six to ten MIRV's it delivers provide a yield of up to 150KT each
and each Typoon-or newer Borey class submarines can carry up to sixteen missiles.
Given the Little Boy bomb used on Hiroshima had a yield of about 15kT,
then one submarine can potentially deliver the equivalent of about 1,600
Hiroshima "blasts".
In 2004, then president Putin claimed that Bulava warheads would be able to
breach any new ballistic missile defence system.
One potential point for future tensions is the Arctic region. In September this
year, two German cargo ships carrying construction materials made history
by traveling between Korea and the Netherlands via the Arctic route
as a result of the thawing ice. This cuts thousands of miles off the trip.
See New York Times article here -
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/sc...11passage.html
On 10th November this year, the Vice Chief of Naval Operations for the
US Department of the Navy issued a memorandum called the "Navy Arctic
Roadmap". In a nutshell, it states that since the Earth's climate is changing
and that the Arctic ice is thawing, as a result this new Arctic sea route is of
strategic and economic importance to the United States and that they need
to put in place key objectives now.
As the roadmap states, this includes the goal to
"project a sovereign United
States maritime presence" and to
"cooperate with other Arctic nations to address
likely issues from increased shipping".
The roadmap acknowledges that
"While the United States has stable relationships
with other Arctic nations, the changing environment and competition for resources
may contribute to increasing tension, or, conversely, provide opportunities for
cooperative solutions".
The Roadmap document, which is unclassified, can be found here -
http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/da...p-nov-2009.pdf
In 2001, Russia made a submission to the UN to extend the continental shelf of
Russia, that is the sea-floor, to extend into large parts of the Arctic.
The Russians have stated that the new Arctic sea-route will hopefully bring them
greater economic benefits as international carriers begin to use it.
