Why all the fuss about Russia’s newly demonstrated Oreshnik hypersonic missile?
Russian state television yesterday was explaining to its domestic audience how awed Western leaders were by the first use of Russia’s still ‘experimental’ hypersonic intermediate range missile, the Oreshnik (hazelnut tree). They showed on screen the utter confusion of Zelensky over how to respond other than to publicly beg Washington for further shipments of anti-aircraft systems to better protect his homeland. Of course, all of US and Western defenses are useless against the invincible Russian missile.
On The Great Game, the presenter and panelists were uncertain whether the significance of the Russian attack on a military installation in the Dnepropetrovsk region last week using Oreshnik was fully understood by Collective Biden, even if the Pentagon was sure to have been awed.
For their part, my peers in the alternative Western media have had their say about Oreshnik and seem to concur that it represents a new entry into the Russian missile arsenal that has no equivalent in the West. But I have not heard exactly why it is such a novel development and, as some have said, ‘a game changer.’ Let us address these issues here and now.
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President Putin devoted a large part of his State of the Nation address on 1 March 2018 to rolling out before the Russian public and the world the various state of the art weapons systems that Russia had been developing ever since President Bush Jr withdrew from the ABM Treaty in 2002 and the USA appeared to have made a first strike capability on Russia its national security objective.
Putin’s talk about hypersonic missiles, about missiles circling the globe and striking North America from the South Pole, thereby rendering useless the US radar arrays looking north, - these and other Wunderwaffen were dismissed by many Western observers at the time as just a bluff. How could technically backward Russia steal the march on the United States in strategic weapons operating as it did on a military budget 10 times less than America’s? Moreover, since Putin’s speech was made in the final weeks before a presidential election, his words were taken by many Western experts to be no more than pre-electoral hyperbole by an incumbent seeking reelection.
What happened a week ago was the first demonstration before the global audience that the Russian hypersonic missiles are a reality and that their destructive force based solely on the physics of mass times velocity is comparable to that of some tactical nuclear warheads.
We were told by many talking heads in the West that the Oreshnik is the first of its kind.
Wrong! The Oreshnik is an intermediate range variant based on operational principles that were already incorporated into ICBMs that Russia produced and put on active duty back in 2018. I have in mind the Sarmat, which has in its nosecone perhaps a dozen Avangard hypersonic missiles each of which is individually targetable. Those Avangard on board follow a glide path and reach a velocity of 20 times the speed of sound (Mach) before hitting their targets with either conventional or more typically nuclear warheads.
Note: everyone speaks of the Oreshnik as ‘intermediate range’ which it just barely is. Its range is said to be 5500 km, which is the outer limit of Intermediate and the lower limit of ICBMs.
But range is not the distinguishing feature of the Oreshnik just as hypersonic speed ( in this case 10 Mach) is not its distinguishing feature. Its fuel and launchers are the distinguishing feature.
The Sarmat is a liquid fuel missile that is launched from silos on land. These silos are hardened so as to protect against even a direct hit by a nuclear weapon, but their location is surely known to the adversary. The Oreshnik, by contrast, is a solid fuel rocket that is launched from mobile launchers that can be moved around and hidden under camouflage as required. Therefore, its possible destruction in a preemptive first strike by some adversary is far more problematic.
In the present-day context of the war in Ukraine, even without explosives on board, the Oreshnik has the force at impact to destroy everything below it to a depth of 200 meters. This means that the bunkers used in Kiev and elsewhere in Ukraine by US and NATO officers coordinating the military operations, and also the bunkers now protecting Mr. Zelensky and his war criminal confederates are entirely vulnerable to Russian attack at the time of Moscow’s choosing.
As regards Western Europe, the generally quoted warning time from launch of the Oreshnik in mainland Russia to impact in Berlin is 11 minutes. However, if launched from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, the flight time is reduced to about 4 minutes. This has surely unnerved Mr. Scholz and his little band of would-be warriors in Germany. Sooner or later the same arithmetic will be understood by Cold Warriors in Paris and Brussels. None of them will know what hit them if the Russians go on the offensive and attack Europe with the Oreshnik in response to the various provocations surely being hatched in NATO meetings this week.
Finally, let us look at the calendar.
The Biden Administration used arm-twisting to get Scholz & Company to agree to the positioning of nuclear armed American Tomahawk intermediate range cruise missiles on German soil for possible use against Russia in what could be a decapitating attack. Delivery is scheduled for 2026, two years from now.
But we are living in 2024 and the Russian answer to the future Tomahawks is here and now, ready to be fired against NATO countries if they proceed with their insane plans to attack Russia or to ship nuclear arms to Kiev, which is also said to be under discussion.
And that, ‘in a nutshell’ is what the advent of the Oreshkov (hazelnut tree) is all about.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024