• Miles O'Brien@startrek.website
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    13 hours ago

    Oh what a coincidence, I just concluded tests for the teleportation bomb! It’s an explosive that’s totally untraceable and teleports to it’s target, so it’s a 100% completely guaranteed anonymous strike on your target.

    Source: trust me bro

  • NoForwadSlashS@piefed.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    14 hours ago

    Usually, when someone has developed an amazing new weapon that no-one else has, you don’t get all dressed up and go on TV to tell the world all about it.

  • potoooooooo ☑️@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    edit-2
    15 hours ago

    Oh, shit, is that camo!? This guy must be the ultimate fucking badass. Literally zero chance he’s an adorable little cancer-stricken Keebler elf. I mean, goddamn! Camo! Shit, son!

  • obelix@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    16 hours ago

    It must be serious, he put his special little windcheater on for the announcement.

  • Skiluros@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    16 hours ago

    “The Skyfall is a uniquely stupid weapon system, a flying Chernobyl that poses more threat to Russia than it does to other countries," agreed Thomas Countryman, a former top State Department official with the Arms Control Association, referring to the 1986 nuclear plant disaster.

  • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    16 hours ago

    “The 9M730 Burevestnik (Russian: Буревестник; “Storm petrel”, NATO reporting name: SSC-X-9 Skyfall) is a Russian low-flying, nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed cruise missile under development for the Russian Armed Forces. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, the missile’s range is effectively unlimited.”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik

    Also from that article: Director of the Federation of American Scientists’s Nuclear Information Project Hans M. Kristensen points out that the Burevestnik will be as vulnerable as any cruise missile, and questions the motive behind it, since the longer it flies the more time there is to track it.

    Former Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear researcher Cheryl Rofer and former top State Department official with the Arms Control Association Thomas Countryman have both pointed out the risk of nuclear contamination to Russia itself, with Countryman calling the weapon system “uniquely stupid” and calling it a “flying Chernobyl”.

    • notabot@piefed.social
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      11 hours ago

      Didn’t the US come up with the idea of a nuclear powered ramjet missile back around the cold war? I seem to recall the idea was that it’d massively contaminate everything it flew over before crashing and exploding. It would be able to fly for many hours or days and shooting it down just meant a load of radioactive scrap landed on your head. I think it too was deemed “uniquely stupid” and shelved, but it sounds like the Russians have resurected the idea.

      • Marthirial@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        10 hours ago

        The Russian way: Impractical, self-harming, unreliable, half-assed. 10% research, 20% development, 20% hype, 50% damage control and saving face.

      • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        11 hours ago

        Yep, the USA build a bunch of them and ran several tests, so they are very qualified to know how bad an idea this is. Radioactive pollution in the air + the risk of an active nuclear reactor falling from the sky. Supposedly some Russians have already died in 2019 when recovering a missile that crashed in 2017.

        A much more in depth article than the wiki article, but with more speculation: https://basicint.org/brief-burevestnik/

    • calliope@retrolemmy.com
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      11 hours ago

      Didn’t North Korea recently have a parade with another comically large “weapon” that would only fool extremely stupid people?

      This seems familiar, is all.

      It’s sad that the world’s leaders are pathetic little boys.

    • Zer0_F0x@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      15 hours ago

      Modern nuclear weapons carry multiple warheads per missile launched, each individually controlled. You can strike a dozen different cities in one launch.

      They have 3 phases: Launch, coast, re-entry. You can intercept them successfully in the first two.

      Once the warheads have been jettisoned from the missile it’s really hard to get them in the re-entry phase, they’re really small and come in at Mach 10 and there’s dozens of them.

      The US has a system that can supposedly intercept a few but it’s not gonna be nearly enough to make any meaningful difference.

      The only way to “win” a nuclear war is to first know exactly where absolutely every single one of your enemy’s nukes are and then striking all of the launch sites first without your massive preparation to do so being detected.

      • gressen@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        14 hours ago

        You’re quoting details about ballistic missiles but this news in about w cruice missile - totally different thing.

        • Zer0_F0x@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          14 hours ago

          Those are the “invincible” ones the person above me has in their mind.

          This new missile is a cruise missile indeed, which can be intercepted with most anti aircraft solutions