Independent military analysts believe that Russia intentionally leaked plans of a long-range nuclear torpedo during a meeting with President Vladimir Putin.
“I have a feeling it was shown in order to scare the world,” explained Alexander Golts, an independent Moscow-based military analyst. “It’s an attempt to offer an asymmetrical answer to the U.S. missile defense.”
NTV and Channel One broadcast images of a general studying plans for a Status-6 system that can “destroy important economic installations of the enemy in coastal areas and cause guaranteed devastating damage to the country’s territory by creating wide areas of radioactive contamination, rendering them unusable for military, economic or other activity for a long time.”
“The plan is to deliver a 100-megaton nuclear bomb to the U.S. shores,” said Pavel Felgenhauer. “It would cause a highly radioactive tsunami.”
Felgenhauer also said the designs look like a “reincarnation of an old idea.” The Associated Press reports:
Military experts and commentators traced the nuclear torpedo concept to the 1950s, when it was first offered by Andrei Sakharov, the father of Soviet thermonuclear bomb who later came to defy the Soviet system and won a Nobel Peace Prize. He proposed targeting the U.S. with high-yield nuclear torpedoes that would create huge tsunami waves and high levels of radioactivity to render large coastline areas uninhabitable.
The proposal was rejected, partly because naval technology of the era wouldn’t allow a Soviet submarine to approach the U.S. shore undetected.
These new plans show a missile with a range of 5,400 miles, but incredibly small. It could operate at a “depth of 3,280 feet and a speed of 65 miles per hour,” which makes it harder to spot.
Putin told his generals that “the US and its NATO allies were forging ahead with a global anti-missile defence system” while ignoring Russia’s “concerns” and “offers of co-operation” right before the stations aired the details. Putin also told the men the West’s plans are “an attempt to undermine the existing parity in strategic nuclear weapons and essentially to upset the whole system of global and regional stability.”
The television stations quickly deleted all images of the plans.
“It’s true that some secret information was caught by the camera and therefore it was subsequently removed,” admitted Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman. “We hope this will not happen again.”