Dec 02, 2024
Video via Twitter/X
The reverberations from the Oreshnik ballistic missile strike on Dnipro continue to echo two weeks after the event, mainly because President Putin keeps making public statements about what an effective weapon Oreshnik is. These are duly repeated by the media in Russia and abroad.
The use of an intermediate range ballistic missile with conventional warheads was a world first. Containing no explosive, the thirty-six submunitions inflict damage by kinetic energy, “like a meteorite falling,” as Putin put it. The shower of artificial meteorites looked impressive, but the evidence suggests that it did little actual damage. The strike was more of an impressive firework display than a real threat.
Rods From God
Thinktank RAND proposed putting tungsten rods on ICBMS in place of nuclear warheads back in the 1950s in Project Thor, and the idea was used by science fiction writers including Jerry Pournelle. Rather than simply descending at once, the rods could be left orbiting and redirected to come plummeting down on a selected target.
U.S. Air Force
Advocates like to claim that these ‘rods from god’ as they came to be known could strike with the force of a nuclear weapon but with no radiation or fallout.
Decades later, Putin is making is exactly the same claims, stating that several weapons used in the same location would have an effect “comparable in strength to a nuclear strike” and that “We know in history what meteorites have fallen where, and what the consequences were. Sometimes it was enough for whole lakes to form.”
Likely he is simply parroting what his ‘technical experts’ have told him without questioning too closely.
The claims is technically true, but only in a very narrow sense. The thing to remember here is that, in the famous words of another science fiction writer in a work featuring kinetic bombardment from space “There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.”
With no explosive, the only energy in those warheads is what has been put in to accelerating them to high speed by the burning of rocket fuel. In the case of the Oreshnik, which is believed to be a direct derivative of the existing RS-26, the warhead of six independent re-entry vehicles weighs about 1,800 pounds and, according to Putin, impacts at a speed of Mach 10.
This translates to a kinetic energy of about 3.6 billion Joules, somewhat less than the explosive energy of one ton of TNT (4.4 billion Joules).
This low number is not surprising. The total weight of the RS-26 is less than forty tons, and much of this is taken up with the casing, rocket nozzles, guidance, warhead and other elements besides the fuel. A large fraction of the energy goes in accelerating the ‘parasitic’ weight, which is why stages are dropped as soon as they burn out, And while the rocket reaches Mach 20 in space, it loses half of its speed (and three quarters of its energy) from atmospheric drag on the way down. There is no free lunch and in fact most of the energy put into the rocket is wasted.
Hence, the kinetic-armed Oreshnik delivers as much energy as a 2,000-pound bomb. It is a big bang, but not in the same league as the U.S Air Force’s GBU-43 Massive Ordnance Air Blast aka ‘Mother Of All Bombs’ with a filling of H-6 explosive equivalent to 11 tons of TNT.
Getty Images
Could you compare several Oreshniks hitting the same spot to a nuclear blast? Well, the W54 warhead (‘atomic watermelon’) developed for the Jeep-mounted Davy Crockett Nuclear Weapon System in the 1950s is generally reckoned the smallest such weapon ever built. On its lowest setting it could be dialed down to a yield of 10 tons of TNT or about 12 Oreshniks. So in this limited sense, a large number of the Russian missiles hitting the same spot could be compared to the smallest possible nuclear strike.
Except for one important issue: they cannot even come close to hitting the same spot.
Questionable Accuracy
The Oreshnik strike hit the Yuzhmash plant in Dnipro, a facility previously used for producing spacecraft and rockets. There were no reports of casualties, and low-resolution satellite imagery did not show craters, demolished buildings, or in fact any significant damage to the plant, which had been struck by previous Russian attacks.
Later, when high-resolution image became available, the effects still failed to emerge.
“The buildings are still standing. The strike may have done some additional damage to the buildings, but I don’t see much,” Dr. Jeffrey Lewis of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey and the founding publisher of Arms Control Wonk.com, told me.
The video of the strike indicates that each of the six warheads released six submunitions for a total of 36 artificial meteorites weighing about fifty pounds each. According to current best estimates, the RS-26 has a ‘Circular Error Probable’ or CEP of 90-250 meters , meaning that half the projectiles would lie inside a circle of that radius. This is accurate enough for a nuclear warhead with a blast radius of several kilometers, but not for a handful of kinetic warheads.
A rough calculation suggests that if the CEP is 150 meters, then 36 submunitions landing at random would only give about a 6% chance of scoring one hit on a house-sized target bewteen them. No surprise they seem to have missed, especially as the video indicates the spread may have been wider than this.
If one munition did hit the target by chance, how much damage would it do? Most likely, like a rifle bullet fired downwards, at Mach 10 it would plunge through the roof and the floors below and expend its energy embedding itself deep in the ground.
Corbis via Getty Images
When the U.S. looked at a similar concept, converting Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles into conventional weapons for Prompt Global Strike in the early 2000s, their intended targets were deep underground bunkers. The high-speed projectiles would be ideal for smashing into hardened concrete command bunkers or deeply-buried facilities. They would be less effective against anything on the surface, and the idea was shelved.
Lewis says this inaccuracy means that previous planners believed that to counteract the spready, rather than rods from god the payload would be arrows from above: flechettes. These are nail-sized metal arrows; thousands would be released from high altitude to saturate a large area.
Some aircraft dropped bundles of flechettes in WW1, and the U.S experimented with air-dropped Lazy Dog darts in Vietnam. There was no sign of flechettes in the debris at the Yuzhmash site, the submunitions appears to have been simply solid masses of metal.
The challenge of aerodynamic darts which will separate cleanly tumbling at Mach 10, then spread out to evenly blanket an area below is not trivial. It would probably take many test launches to perfect and find the ideal size, shape and weight of flechette, if this is even possible. And this was the first time Oreshnik has been fired.
While a rain of flechettes might be as effective as a conventional shrapnel bomb and cover a similar area, it is hardly comparable to a nuclear strike.
A Threat To Europe
Some Western commentators have taken Putin’s narrative at face value, suggesting that the new wonder weapon might carry out decapitation strikes against European countries, or devastate NATO airbases in Western Europe.
This would require a lot of missiles; Lewis suggests that, based on previous Russian missile production, they could produce tens of Oreshniks per year. This assumes it is a priority. Given that Russia’s missile industry is struggling to make as many missiles as possible at present, it seems doubtful they would divert so many resources into a weapon that produces such little effect.
“This isn’t about Ukraine,” says Lewis “It is about coercing Germany, France and Britain.”
He notes a graphic produced by Russian media showing the flight time of Oreshniks to various European capitals.
This looks very much like a simple attempt to intimidate. The real Oreshnik is nothing like as fierce as Putin seems to believe. Hundreds of other ballistic missiles like the Iskander (nuclear capable, by the way) have failed to subdue Ukraine. Putin’s much-hyped hypersonic Kinzhal missile was also a dud.
It might be convenient for others though, however, if Putin were to invest in these hugely expensive and largely ineffective missiles rather than thousands more of the lost-cost drones that bombard Ukraine night after night. Such drones, each with a warhead as powerful as one of Oreshnik’s submunition, may represent a far greater future threat than the science fiction threat of artificial meteorites.
Pretty strange that the bloodthirsty ghoul goes from threatening with nukes to threatening with this junk. What gives?
The rods from god failed to impress anyone except the delinquents like Rogan. Two days after this firework display, Ukraine destroyed a mafia land airbase in Kursk with ATACMS. Suddenly the rods from god were never mentioned again by putler.
The horse used one as a dildo on the runt. That ruined putler’s enthusiasm for them as a weapon.