Russia’s New Missile Means the Nucl

Russia’s New Missile Means the Nuclear Arms Race Is Back On
Team Putin is talking up fearsome new hardware that could accelerate a nuclear contest not seen since the Cold War.
Russia has a new nuclear missile—one that Zvezda, a Russian government-owned TV network, claimed can wipe out an area “the size of Texas or France.”
Actually, no, a single SS-30 rocket with a standard payload of 12 independent warheads, most certainly could not destroy Texas or France. Not immediately. And not by itself.
Each of the SS-30’s multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle warheads, or MIRVs, could devastate a single city. But Texas alone has no fewer than 35 cities of 100,000 people or more.
Which is not to say the instantaneous destruction of a dozen cities and the deaths of millions of people in a single U.S. state wouldn’t mean the end of the world as we know it.
Nobody nukes just Texas. And if Russia is disintegrating Texan cities, that means Russia is also blasting cities all over the United States and allied countries—while America and its allies nuke Russia right back.
Moscow’s arsenal of roughly 7,000 atomic weapons—1,800 of which are on high alert—and America's own, slightly smaller arsenal—again, only 1,800 of which are ready to fire at any given time—plus the approximately 1,000 warheads that the rest of the world's nuclear powers possess are, together, more than adequate to kill every human being on Earth as well as most other forms of life.
One new Russian rocket doesn’t significantly alter that terrible calculus.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be alarmed. The SS-30 is only the latest manifestation of a worrying trend. After decades of steady disarmament, the United States and Russia are pouring tens of billions of dollars into building new and more capable nuclear weaponry that experts agree neither country needs, nor can afford.
The SS-30 by itself is just slightly more destructive than older Russian missiles. It’s what the new weapon represents that’s frightening. The post-Cold War nuclear holiday is over. And apocalyptic weaponry such as Russia’s new SS-30 are back at work making the world a very, very scary place.
Moscow approved development of the SS-30 in 2009 as a replacement for the Cold War-vintage SS-18. Seven years later, the first rockets are reportedly ready for testing. The Kremlin wants the new missiles to be ready for possible wartime use as early as 2018.
Details about the new weapon are hard to come by. Sputnik, a Russian state-owned news website, described the SS-30 as a two-stage rocket with a mass of 100 tons and a range of 6,200 miles. Launching from underground silos in sparsely-populated eastern Russia, SS-30s could fly over the North Pole and rain down their dozen MIRVs on cities and military bases all over North America.
Incidentally, America’s own nuclear attack plans more or less mirror Russian's plans. U.S. rockets would cross the North Pole headed in the opposite direction and deploy their own MIRVs to smash Russian cities and bases.
Those plans haven’t changed much in 50 years. Nor have the nuclear missiles themselves changed very much. The older SS-18 is actually slightly heavier than the SS-30 and boasts a similar range while carrying 10 MIRVs. One difference between the two missiles is that, being newer, the SS-30 will undoubtedly be easier to maintain.
And then there are the countemeasures. The SS-30 reportedly comes equipped with what Sputnik described as “an array of advanced anti-missile countermeasures” that, in concept, could distract U.S. defenses and ensure that the warheads strike their targets.
But no country—neither the United States nor anyone else—possesses a working missile shield able to intercept a heavy, intercontinental ballistic missile traveling at 20 times the speed of sound. America’s costly missile-defense systems, including ship- and land-based interceptors, are designed to knock down relatively slow-flying, medium-range ballistic missiles fired by, say, Iran or North Korea.
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In that sense, the SS-30’s offensive advancements are solutions to a problem that doesn’t exist. The SS-30 is no more, and no less, capable of ending the world as part of the wider nuclear war.
What’s worrying is that Russia even wants to replace its old SS-18s. Since the end of the Cold War in 1991, Washington and Moscow have both cut their nuclear stockpiles by thousands of weapons. And the two government had a chance to eliminate even more weapons and advance U.S. president Barack Obama’s stated goal of “stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and ... seeking a world without them.”
But Russia’s military resurrgence under President Vladimir Putin and tensions over Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008 and the Kremlin’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region in 2014—not to mention the destabilizing effect