A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fired from an underground silo on the country’s southern steppe Friday on a scheduled test to deliver a dummy warhead to a remote impact zone nearly 4,000 miles away. The missile didn’t even make it 4,000 feet.
Russia’s military has been silent on the accident, but the missile’s crash was seen and heard for miles around the Dombarovsky air base in Orenburg Oblast near the Russian-Kazakh border.
A video posted by the Russian blog site MilitaryRussia.ru on Telegram and widely shared on other social media platforms showed the missile veering off course immediately after launch before cartwheeling upside down, losing power, and then crashing a short distance from the launch site. The missile ejected a component before it hit the ground, perhaps as part of a payload salvage sequence, according to Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva.
The crash was accompanied by a fireball and a noxious reddish-brown cloud, the telltale sign of a toxic mix of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide used to fuel Russia’s most powerful ICBMs. Satellite images taken since Friday show a crater and burn scar near the missile silo.
Analysts say the circumstances of the launch suggest it was likely a test of Russia’s RS-28 Sarmat missile, a weapon designed to reach targets more than 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) away, making it the world’s longest-range missile.
An Unusable Weapon
The Sarmat missile is Russia’s next-generation heavy-duty ICBM, capable of carrying a payload of up to 10 large nuclear warheads, a combination of warheads and countermeasures, or hypersonic boost-glide vehicles, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Simply put, the Sarmat is a doomsday weapon designed for use in an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States.
Therefore, it’s no wonder Russian officials like to talk up Sarmat’s capabilities. Russian president Vladimir Putin has called Sarmat a “truly unique weapon” that will “provide food for thought for those who, in the heat of frenzied aggressive rhetoric, try to threaten our country.” Dmitry Rogozin, then the head of Russia’s space agency, called the Sarmat missile a “superweapon” after its first test flight in 2022.
So far, what’s unique about the Sarmat missile is its propensity for failure. The missile’s first full-scale test flight in 2022 apparently went well, but the program has suffered a string of consecutive failures since then, most notably a catastrophic explosion last year that destroyed the Sarmat missile’s underground silo in northern Russia.
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