The Oreshnik missile
my main concern is that the misunderstanding in among policy makers could lead to completely uninformed decision to believe that you should respond proportionally with a nuclear weapon to a to an Oreshnik attack. No way that would be justifiable. And I'll explain why. And that's the important policy point here. This is not a weapon that approaches the strike power of a nuclear weapon. Very very important.
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They're significant because there are lots of them and they can be clustered and they can do a tremendous amount of damage against a target where you know what you want to hit and you know what you want to do.
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This thing is not interceptable. people who are talking about intercepting it because there are ways of there's no intercepting it and the reason you wouldn't be able to intercept it is because of the trajectory it takes. It has this high trajectory. It releases the warhead at a very high altitude. It releases the warheads at a very high altitude. Can you see again where to go here? So you have you the munition uh accelerates to about nearly 4 kilometers per second in one minute. If you're here in the defensive area, what can you do about it? Now it coasts to a very high altitude. It's close to 750 kilometers altitude. I mean that's tremendous. It reorients itself at some point. You can do it anywhere along this trajectory and then deploys the canisters. So now you have can So you have six separate canisters, you know, moving away from the body. How are you going to reach them? This thing is coming in at 4 kilometers uh or second uh and it's taking minutes to come in. You're going to launch interceptors. Those interceptors are going to take minutes to get out. They're only traveling at maybe a couple of kilometers per second. By that time, the canisters will have released the submunitions. So, where's the defense? This is, you know, there is no defense. There's no way you could put together a defense against this thing.
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Hypersonic missiles are not going to be subject to air defense intercepts.
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If you listen to Putin carefully, he's really worried that he's going to deal with a president who has no idea what he's doing and that he'll launch nuclear weapons against Russia thinking he can achieve something that's a fiction. And that's why Putin has so carefully tried to make it clear that any attack on Russia will be suicidal. It's not just talking about Orshnik. It's talking about the dead hand system. It's talking about Poseidon, this underwater nuclear drone. He wants the most imbecillic American president to know that attacking Russia and trying to use missile defenses would still result in suicide.
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