Failski

Russia’s Apocalypse Missile Keeps Crashing:

Vladimir Putin’s much-hyped nuclear-powered cruise missile is having trouble staying in the air. The Russian president announced the weapon in March as part of a package of new nuclear arms, but the unnamed missile has crashed four times in four months.

The use of a nuclear engine theoretically gives the new missile unlimited range, allowing it to fly thousands of miles to skirt existing U.S. air defenses. So far, however, the missile has flown no further than 22 miles over the course of two minutes. Sources told CNBC the nuclear engine is apparently failing to start, causing the crashes.

When it was revealed in March, Russia's missile was immediately compared to the Pentagon’s Cold War-era Supersonic Low Altitude Missile, or SLAM. A low-flying nuclear-powered cruise missile, SLAM was made to fly a long, circuitous route over the Soviet Union, raining hydrogen bombs down on communist targets. SLAM was cancelled in part because it was simply too difficult to test. A crash-landed missile would spew radioactive debris, contaminating a wide area.

That last part is very telling. We cancelled the program because ICBMs rendered the concept obsolete. We did, however, build and test the nuclear engines... in 1961. That's how "advanced" Russian military research programs are: they can't build something we built and discarded in 1961. In fact, they've never built anything on par with American military equipment unless they stole the plans from us. Every time their military equipment comes up against American equipment, a Russian junkyard instantly materializes. Remember how a few months ago they threatened to shoot down the cruise missiles we fired into Syria? Know how many they shot down? It's a nice round number. Very round. ZERO.

The only "apocalypse" this missile is likely to produce is to the already anemic Russian economy. Perhaps they should stop dicking around with ancient and useless military technology and focus instead on figuring out how to feed their population without importing food every year.