Russia just showed off a potentially world-ending nuclear ‘doomsday’ torpedo that the US can’t stop.
Just days after Russian President Vladimir Putin met with President Donald Trump, Russia’s Ministry of Defense has released a video of one of its most inhumane and fearsome nuclear weapons ever created — and it’s purpose-built to avoid US defenses.
The weapon, a high-speed nuclear-powered torpedo, isn’t like other nuclear weapons. While there’s a risk of radioactivity any time an atom is split, nuclear weapons have typically used nuclear detonations to create heat and pressure, with lingering radioactivity emerging only as a dangerous side effect.
But the new Russian torpedo uses radioactive waste to deter, scare, and potentially punish enemies for decades.
These types of nuclear explosions “suck up dirt, or water, contaminates it with debris from the bomb, and then lofts it into the atmosphere,” leaving deadly radioactive fallout potentially strewn across thousands of miles, Stephen Schwartz, the author of “Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of US Nuclear Weapons Since 1940,” said. What’s more, the bomb is rumored to have its nuclear core coated in a metal that would make the fall out last for half a century.
“It’s an insane weapon in the sense that it’s probably as indiscriminate and lethal as you can make a nuclear weapon,” Hans Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, told Business Insider.
Russia hasn’t specified how big the nuclear warhead is, but Kristensen said reports indicated it’s “anything from a normal yield to up to 100 megatons,” making it potentially one of the biggest bombs ever built.
Russia has advertised a simple mission for the torpedo: “Going in and blowing up a harbor with the purpose of blanketing a coastal area with radiation to make it uninhabitable” in a “blatant violation on the international laws of war, which require them to avoid collateral damage,” Kristensen said.
So how do ordinary nuclear weapons adhere to the international laws of war and avoid collateral damage unlike this nasty, communist, blatantly violating Russian one? Maybe Kristensen sould explain this, as it’s a widely held belief that any city-levelling warhead is pretty indiscriminate.
What kind of nonsense is that last statement by Kristensen? All nuclear weapons are indiscriminate and none avoid collateral damage.