A Terror Weapon from the Deep
Russia plans to deploy a submarine‑launched, nuclear‑powered, nuclear-armed, stealthy drone capable of traveling thousands of kilometers beneath the waves and detonating off a coastal city. This is the new threat posed by Russia’s Poseidon undersea nuclear weapon (also called Status‑6 or NATO “Kanyon”). According to open‑source reports, Poseidon is designed to operate at great depth, at high speed, and over long ranges to attack U.S. and allied coastlines in a way that bypasses missile defenses. This article examines the impact of Russia’s Poseidon weapon on the balance of nuclear terror.
Poseidon nuclear torpedo
Poseidon is often described as a torpedo, but it is much bigger than any existing torpedo. It is about 80 feet long and five to seven feet wide. The enormous power of its nuclear propulsion system enables it to reach an underwater speed of around 100 mph, faster than any existing submarine or conventional torpedo. Poseidon carries a nuclear warhead with an estimated yield of 1-2 megatons, about 50 times the power of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. Russia has just commissioned Khabarovsk, the first of a new class of atomic submarines armed with the Poseidon. Khabarovsk can carry six Poseidons and can launch them at targets thousands of kilometers away. Poseidon is expected to enter service after completion of additional sea trials.
Massive Destruction and a Deadly Aftermath
Detonation of the Poseidon’s nuclear warhead near a port city would completely destroy the infrastructure of the port, rendering it useless for a prolonged period. Although the underwater explosion would produce less extensive physical damage to a coastal city than an air burst, radioactive fallout would pose a serious long-term contamination problem because the target city would be drenched and partially flooded by radioactive water and debris displaced by the nuclear blast. Analysts have dismissed claims that the Poseidon warhead could create a “tsunami,” but the shower of radioactive fallout would still be highly damaging, rendering a large urban area uninhabitable for a long period.
Unlike dry land fallout, which settles quickly and loses most of its danger within two weeks, the radioactive contamination from an underwater detonation remains hazardous far longer. When a nuclear device explodes in seawater, fission products bond to fine salt crystals and suspended sediments rather than heavy soil particles. These microscopic particles stay mobile, carried by tides and currents, and continually resettle on shorelines, docks, and harbor bottoms. Long-lived isotopes such as cesium-137 and strontium-90 become trapped in mud and marine life, creating chronic rather than transient contamination. The result is a self-renewing radiological hazard that cannot be cleaned once and forgotten; it must be isolated, dredged, and monitored for decades.
Decontaminating a coastal city after a shallow, multi-megaton offshore detonation would be extraordinarily difficult, slow, and expensive. Radioactive seawater and contaminated sediments would persist because of wave and tidal action. Cleaning would not be a one-time wash but a long campaign of isolation, repeated washing, targeted demolition, dredging of “hot” sediments, and secure disposal of huge volumes of contaminated material.
Emergency triage could be accomplished in days or weeks, but major functional recovery of key port facilities would take months, and full remediation or safe reuse of all heavily affected waterfront areas would likely take years to decades. The cost of decontamination would be enormous. Estimates run from tens of billions into the low-hundreds of billions of dollars for a major port city, and that excludes broader economic damage from lost commerce, longer-term health monitoring, and political/social costs. This makes Poseidon a devastating threat.
Why Defense is Technically and Logistically Challenging
Several technical and logistical factors drive the cost of defense against the Poseidon weapon. Its nuclear propulsion system gives the weapon extraordinary speed, range, and payload capabilities. Poseidon also benefits from the intrinsic stealthiness of submarines, and its design is optimized to reduce acoustic detection. Because of its very long range, a single Poseidon can threaten many widely separated coastal targets, requiring the defender to cover entire littoral zones, choke‑points, and seabed corridors with sensor networks and reaction forces. Simply put: the cost of a Poseidon attack is far lower than the cost of defending against it.
Costly Layered Defense Requirement
Because no existing defenses against Poseidon exist, the United States would have to create an entirely new, high-end undersea detection and interception architecture. A realistic package for a single major port, including seabed sensor fields, mobile ASW/uncrewed systems, a dedicated command-and-control node, and an intercept layer (torpedo mines or defensive UUVs), would likely cost on the order of $5 billion over 10 years per city once operations and maintenance are included. Scaling that to roughly two dozen economically critical U.S. coastal cities pushes the 10-year bill into the $100–140 billion range, and that is before counting national R&D, testing, and program management. In other words, Russia can impose a triple-digit-billion defense burden on the United States by fielding a relatively small number of exotic undersea weapons.
Undersea detection network
Tethered torpedo mine
The Need for Renewed Arms Control
The advent of Poseidon is further evidence of the revival of the nuclear arms racing that characterized the Cold War. The U.S. missile‑defense build‑out pressured Russia into developing exotic systems like Poseidon in order to preserve strategic retaliatory strength. In this dynamic, one state’s defense investment prompts another’s exotic delivery system investment, which in turn forces further defense spending. The only way to avoid the open-ended growth of defense costs and nuclear war risk from arms racing is arms control agreements.
A treaty banning Poseidon-type undersea nuclear weapons would offer clear benefits to both major powers. For the United States, it would eliminate a uniquely hard-to-detect, high-level threat to its densely populated coasts and spare it the immense cost of developing and maintaining nationwide underwater detection and defense networks. For Russia, it would trade an expensive and technically demanding niche program for strategic stability, budget relief, and international legitimacy as a responsible actor shaping next-generation arms-control norms. Both sides would reduce accident risk, environmental contamination, and crisis miscalculation while preserving freedom to pursue conventional unmanned undersea technologies. In short, each would gain stability, predictability, and economic efficiency by outlawing a class of weapons that promise only insecurity and ruinous defense costs.
Conclusion
Given the cost asymmetry, the technical difficulty of defense, and the strategic destabilization posed by weapons like Poseidon, the rational response is to constrain or eliminate such systems through arms control. The only sustainable path is negotiation to limit the deployment of these new under‑sea strategic systems. This would establish verification regimes, renew transparency, and re‑engage on nuclear risk‑reduction frameworks to restore strategic stability. Without a return to nuclear arms control the world will face more new terror weapons like Poseidon and dwindling chances of avoiding catastrophe.
I suspect the main rationale for this weapon (and the similar, airborne nuclear cruise missile) was to make developing a US anti ballistic missile defense futile. The Soviets were (partially) bankrupt by trying to keep up with Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’, MX and stealth projects. (so goes the conventional wisdom) These strike from anywhere systems are almost impossible to defend against. More impossible than effective ballistic missile defense, anyway. So why spend the money on ‘Golden Dome’ if it does nothing to protect against these new systems?
That is part of it, but these would only be useful against coastal targets, so the air based delivery systems are still the larger component.
The majority of economically important cities are coastal. And you probably only need to hit a few to economically cripple a country.
What if the Houthi turn up on a dromedary off the coast of Florida?
They could wade ashore and set up a Fifth Column in South Florida. They would fit right in with the present-day population there. The dromedary would end up at the zoo.
The Soviets did not go bankrupt because of the United States, and certainly not because of some kind of military program. The Soviets went bankrupt because of a utopian and artificial economic model. In the late 80s, a new, very educated generation of people grew up who understood perfectly well that reforms were needed.
The Soviets did not go bankrupt, period. They were heading towards bankruptcy due to the immense cost of the subsidies to Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, the other Comecon countries and most Soviet Republics consuming more GDP than they produced.
It was well understood by Yuri Anropov and his team (one young Gorbachev among them) that cutting the Comecon countries loose would fix most of the problems of the Soviet Economy. That and getting rid of the Brezhnev era corruption.
Under Gorbachev perestroika indeed the new generation managed to capture a lot of the national wealth to form the new class of oligarchs when Yeltsin actually did cut all the Soviet era dependents loose and the Russian Federation wealth suddenly was only for the Russians to loot.
Then the boys and girls from the Chicago School of Economics showed up. It’s no wonder the Russians do not trust America. The last “good” American the average Russian could name is probably, uh, I’ll think of someone soon.
It is a strategic weapon, think Puget Sound, Norfolk and Newport. Then the Panama Canal and other logistics choke points and Rotterdam. No need to sink the carriers, just blow the steering off and let them swing in the wind. No repairing these giants at sea like in WW2. This presumes just like US planners that a limited nuclear war is possible.
A side note on this.
Most articles say ‘nuclear fallout is safe after two weeks’ which is garbage.
It washes into watercourses and low-lying areas, is trapped in flooded basements and infrastructure channels and tunnels. If the target suffers enough infrastructure damage to cause flooding simly moving through the floodwaters disturbs fallout.
Fallout is a long-lived problem, it has to wash somewhere
Though I understand why it exists, I hate everything about this weapon and wish it had never been created. Didn’t we have enough nuclear brinkmanship during the 20th century?
Leo Szilard is the culprit, if he doesn’t write a letter to FDR in 1939 that looks like it came from Einstein, does a nuclear weapon ever get built ever?
Yes, I mean ever.
Think of all those brilliant exiled foreigners working on the Manhattan Project with a huge grudge against Adolf & co.
You could have never glommed them together in regular peacetime~
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Einstein-Roosevelt-letter.png
I don’t agree. The fundamental principles behind nuclear weapons were known for a while by the time WW2 was underway. There were at least two other nuclear weapons programs during the war besides the Manhattan Project (German and Japanese). Somebody would have gotten to the Bomb one way or another eventually, although having all the scientific talent and the resources of US certainly accelerated the process.
Somebody would have gotten to the Bomb one way or another eventually
Indeed. Would anyone feel happier in a timeline where Churchill and the British empire had nukes to throw around when no other state did?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_Alloys
Because the British Tube Alloys nuclear bomb project (aka Churchill’s bomb) kicked off in 1940, preceding the Manhattan Project by eighteen months before it got folded into the Los Alamos project, and indeed kickstarted the American project because that was based on the British research confirming an atomic bomb was possible.
The Britsh project would have got there slower, but it would have got there and at a point when the British would have been desperate.
Likewise, in 1942 Soviet research into a nuclear bomb project had already commenced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project
A good read on this is The Day Man Lost by the Pacific War Research Society in Japan. They cover the US, Japanese, German & Soviet nuclear weapons programs.
You clearly know neither physics or the history of physics.
That fission chain reactions are possible was obvious as soon as it was discovered that fission of U235 emitted two to three neutrons.
The discovery of plutonium, which made quantity production of bombs much easier, was also inevitable.
The only reason other nations did not develop nuclear weapons in WWII was that they simply could not afford to invest in a speculative venture like the Manhattan Project that would be unlikely to deliver usable weapons or power plants before the war would be decided by other means. Note that even the Manhattan Project did not yield a usable weapon in time to shorten the war in Europe, and shortened the war in Asia by only a few months, serving mainly to save the lives of a million or more Japanese who would otherwise have perished as the Kwantung Army’s combat against the Red Army in Manchuria developed into an Okinawa-like tragedy on a many times larger scale, and hundreds of thousands more died of starvation and bombing in the home islands.
As the massive buildup of Japanese forces on Kyushu would likely have led to the U.S. abandoning the plan for a November invasion there, perhaps shifting to the Navy’s recommended strategy of continued bombing and blockade, it’s likely the atomic bombs saved many, many more Japanese than Americans.
Wow, interesting. The Russians seem to be able to make small nuclear powered engines for mobile weapon use.
As for arms control treaties, it’s hard to imagine the current head of the US executive branch entering into such an agreement, but maybe. It would require at least a tacit acknowledgement of US weakness or vulnerability which would be a welcome change of pace.
Yes, the nuclear engine is the most important thing. It is very compact and starts working in seconds. Putin told about it today. It can be installed on other devices as well. In fact, this is a fundamental discovery that will have an impact on many sectors of the economy.
Wall: In fact, this is a fundamental discovery that will have an impact on many sectors of the economy.
Nonsense. The reactor design in Poseidon is almost certainly a liquid metal-cooled reactor, which is three-quarters of a century old and dates back to the 1950s — about as far from a ‘fundamental discovery’ as you can get. Both the Russians/Soviets and the US built them and used them.
The Russians used them in their Alfa class hunter-killer nuclear subs, which were developed in the1950s and finally taken out of service in 1991.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfa-class_submarine
The US Navy used a liquid-metal cooled reactor initially in their second nuclear sub, the USS Seawolf, in 1957, but then tore it out and replaced it with a conventional sub reactor.
Likewise, the Burevestnik nuclear cruise missile is a liquid-metal cooled reactor with 100 percent certainty. There’s no other reactor light enough to put on an aircraft and, similarly, both the US and the USSR developed such reactors for their nuclear-powered bomber projects back in the 1950s and had working reactors at the end of it — the much-vaunted thorium reactor design was actually the reactor design developed for the US Air Force Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program, which began as far back as 1946.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Nuclear_Propulsion
So all credit to the Russian for being much better nuclear engineers than the Americans. But the basic technology is three-quarters of a century old.
Its not. Its closed cycle, the Norwegians have confirmed this. Its new.
JW: Its not. Its closed cycle, the Norwegians have confirmed this. Its new.
No. Closed cycle not only doesn’t contradict liquid-metal cooled reactors, but by definition many liquid-metal reactors must be closed cycle systems.
To be clear on terms, first of all, a closed cycle reactor is one where the working fluid (coolant or propellant) is recirculated rather than vented or expelled. This can apply to both: –
Power generation: The coolant loops through the reactor and heat exchangers without leaving the system.
Propulsion: The propellant is heated and expelled, but in a closed-cycle variant (like a gas-core rocket), the nuclear fuel itself is contained.
In naval or drone reactors (like Poseidon or Alfa-class subs), “closed cycle” typically refers to:
[1] Coolant loop: The liquid metal (e.g., lead-bismuth or sodium) circulates through the reactor core and heat exchangers, transferring heat to a secondary loop (often water/steam) that drives turbines.
[2] No exhaust: Unlike open-cycle systems (e.g., some experimental nuclear jet engines and the Project Pluto ramjet design), nothing is vented into the environment.
Why Liquid-Metal Cooled Reactors in Sea or Air Vessels Need to be Closed-Cycle
The liquid metal coolants used — lead-bismuth eutectic, sodium, or sodium-potassium alloy are highly toxic and reactive — must be contained. Moreover, they operate at low pressure but high temperature, which means compact, but sealed systems such as can be used to propel sea or air vessels.
Thus, for example, the USS Seawolf’s problem on its maiden voyage in 1957 was the near-failure of its closed-cycle system and the reactor’s liquid-metal coolant was sodium. If you recall your high school chemistry, sodium is explosively reactive in contact with H2O. So when you don’t have a working closed-cycle liquid-metal cooled reactor on your sub it’s a potential disaster, and it won’t be much better if your cruise missile’s containment fails and it starts spewing nuclear fuel-contaminated toxic liquid metal over the landscape.
Hope this helps.
So it occurs to me that something that would be confusing is that people also talk about a closed nuclear fuel cycle. In fact, I’ve talked about it here on Naked Capitalism. That’s this —
Russia: World’s first closed fuel nuclear system will recycle 95% of spent fuel
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/russia-nuclear-fuel-cycle
The Nuclear Reactor Closed Cycle.
https://www.ecolo.org/documents/documents_in_english/uran-closed-cycle-sutherl.pdf
If one doesn’t know this stuff already, it would be easy to think that a nuclear reactor closed (fuel) cycle would mean the same thing as a closed cycle nuclear reactor.
No: two different things.
Very good. Now write down how such a reactor starts up in seconds.
This is an assignment and a violation of our written site Policies. Plus being an asshole, a second violation.
So what’s the problem? This is a brand new reactor, not the one this gentleman is writing.
who was it, again, that decided to chuck 50+ years of arms control treaties in the bin?
it wasnt the Ruskies…because i remember Putin, Lavrov and Zakharova all lamenting the chucking of those agreements.
…and all in a headshaking, sad manner, too.
like so many things since the golden elevator ride, this is an own-goal.
(and biden was no better, of course…and the idiocy towards Russia goes back a long, long way…its just stupider, now)
who was it, again, that decided to chuck 50+ years of arms control treaties in the bin?
Quite.
I guess Muricans got hoisted with their own petard, metaphorically. Hopefully they won’t be dumb enough to actually be hoisted with these new Ruskie petards.
Thirty-four years ago next month the “West” won the Cold War in no uncertain terms. This was inevitable, even while several nation states had the power to end the world in a nuclear conflagration.
Instead of stepping back and showing a modicum of magnanimity and asking how we could help the world recover from nearly fifty years of complete and utter insanity, we went further abroad in search of additional monsters to destroy after the fall of the Warsaw Pact. That dissolution, of course, objectively destroyed the raison d’etre of NATO. But it also destroyed the need for Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon et al. Couldn’t have that, so NATO moved to the East despite promises that would not happen (at one time when the Secretary of State of the United States made a promise of that magnitude, the promisee could expect it to be honored, even in the absence of years of paperwork by a battalion of minions).
Thus, instead of spending trillions upon trillions of dollars on peace and recovery for all the people and other living things on planet Earth (our only home, Elon!), we spent it preparing for war against an enemy that no longer existed. Couldn’t have that, either. Now, Russia, which is NOT the Soviet Union, as I continually remind friends who should know better, has responded as should have been expected. They have all the fuel and food they could ever need, and an economy that produces for use instead of for the profit of the few. Plus a deeply felt sense of national purpose. “We” cannot “beat” them on either count.
It did not have to be this way. We won the long twilight struggle and couldn’t take the win. Hosea didn’t know how far into the future his words would resonate. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
KLG: Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
Yup. At a minimum the US has spent over $18 trillion on its imperial wars and military in the period between 1991 and 2025. If instead its elites had invested that money in its people, infrastructure, and R&D — like the CCP in China chose to do over there — it might not be the collapsing idiocracy with Trump as POTUS which it now is.
This isn’t to mention all the billions disappeared into the hands of non-productive financial class extraction scams and bailouts, or moving US manufacturing overseas to China, etcera, etcetera.
I’m sorry. But one wonders: Has the US empire been the stupidest empire in human history? If it hasn’t, it’s up there.
As long as the citizens of the U.S. admire ruthless thugs and prefer to be led by them, we will be in danger of destruction by nuclear war. The more rational elements of the Washington blob have finally recognized that the U.S. can’t fight Russia and China separately, much less combined, and have decided to turn to South America as a safe playground for bullying. So the threat of apocalypse may be receding, but never underestimate the stupidity of U.S. exceptionalists, particularly when Israel is concerned.
I wonder what would happen if the usual suspects in Europe said to Russia, “Welcome, my fellow Europeans.”
If Starmer, Merz, fonda Lyin’ and Kallous have anything to do with it, it will be a very angry Russia kicking the front door in and saying, “You’re f*cked, and it’s time for payback”. And then they will reduce the economies of Europe to home gardening and looting, whilst offering comely women of childbearing age the option to starve to death in the freezing cold or go to Mother Russia to resolve the demographic deficits arising from the Great Patriotic War and the Clinton-Yeltsin nineties. And maybe some nice, interesting jobs for the very few excellent engineers coming out of our universities.
In Russia, it is reported that Khabarovsk carries 12 Poseidons on board. Most importantly, this torpedo has an unlimited range of power thanks to its nuclear propulsion system. That is, she can sail anywhere from anywhere in the ocean. It can explode, not necessarily underwater. Such a torpedo can float up and even land on the shore if there is a convenient beach.
I calculate that, if it really can travel at 100 knots, it could leap out of the water to a height of nearly 100 meters before detonating.
Not sure I’m 100% buying the analysis.
1. Typically “speed” and “quiet” are two opposite things. I assume though the attack tactic would be fast in the open ocean then slow in vicinity of a target.
2. Detection is typically driven by the “sound velocity profile” which results in a near-surface “layer” that refracts/reflects acoustic energy. Operations below this “layer” can be detected by sensors at depth.
3. Back in the days of “Yankee” missile boats, the US/UK developed a significant underwater detection capability. I don’t see that this threat is beyond the capability of sensor detection. Granted, mostly oriented to the Atlantic.
4. Underwater navigation implies inertial guidance. At long range position uncertainty grows.
5. “Shoot the shooter”. As in the cold war, the G-I-UK gap presents a limitation for the shooter, though Vladivostok is a harder problem.
6. Back in my day we had tactical underwater nuclear weapons. We used to joke if a submariner would ever actually launch one of theirs. I could see something like that feasible as a defense. (Not arguing it would be desirable.)
Of course trying to quantify any of this quickly gets out of the realm of open source.
I’m largely inclined to agree, with a few caveats. No question that this would be extremely loud if the speeds claimed are true–this is not a low detectability weapon. Everyone will know it’s coming if it’s launched…although, that makes you wonder what peoole might have learned while the thing was being tested as the noise would have been very obvious.
I suspect that the guidance system is somehow AI enhanced, with the sonar providing feedback/midcourse correction where applicable, although how exactly it would work is unclear to me.
Apparently it’s stealthily slow and quiet, then the burst of energy is sudden
According to the presser at the time
That makes more sense. You would want it to be hard to detect while travelling to a target, so that it isn’t be intercepted mid journey where it won’t do any damage. Nuclear depth charges and nuclear armed torpedoes were a thing in the cold war (as were nucelar armed SAMs) and they would be pretty effective as they do not require to be accurate. They would be less viable close to a targets own shore though. Then a fast burst of speed over the last part of the attack to limit interception possiblities.
You are overrated submarine detection. Speed and quiet are two opposite things with propeller driven watercraft due to cavitation. However, neither the Russian submarine nor the Poseidon torpedo seem to be propeller driven. Moreover, Soviet propeller driven submarines became quieter and more difficult to detect when the USSR was able to get ahold of sophisticated 5 axis milling machines prior to the end of the Cold War. Today they are even quieter.
This in turn led to the SOSUS listening system becoming markedly less effective. Simply put, detecting modern propeller submarines is very difficult. Diesel electric subs are harder to detect underwater due to electric motors being almost silent and nuclear submarines needing relatively louder water pumps continuously running for cooling the reactor. Nations around the world are continuing to work on removing pumps and having propeller less drive systems for nuclear submarines. If and when those go to sea in warships, subs will become even more difficult to detect.
Not that it matters much, but I’ve understood that below 7-8 knots (underwater) the main source (loudest) noise in a submarine is the mechanics (pumps and other moving parts), above that speed but below 20-22 knots the loudest noise comes from the mass of the submarine pushing trough the mass of water (and causing turbulence) while above that it’s the cavitation noise from the propeller blades turning so fast the water boils in the low pressure areas.
Apparently this cavitation noise is in the very low frequencies (below 50Hz), and if it’s “captured” by the ocean thermocline layer, it can “bounce” in that layer for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers. And if one has listening devices in that layer, and if one can positively identify the source (from sound signature), then one can make a pretty good guess – based on the frequency attenuation – of the distance and direction to the source.
Also, for a long time the Soviet design principles were compromising more towards fast, big and highly automatized boats rather than stealthy boats. I assume they were thinking that once submarine’s presence is suspected, it will be discovered (by active measures) and destroyed in quick order. So the emphasis was to get quickly into the launching position and then hopefully outrun the counter-measures.
In the 1970s, Soviet submarines were faster than U.S. torpedoes. Meaning they could simply outrun them. The U.S. however also had rocket assisted torpedoes with nuclear warheads, which neutralized that speed advantage.
The U.S. Navy also had antiaircraft missiles with nuclear warheads. The Army had nuclear warheads for artillery shells. Those were the days. Nuclear weapons for all occasions.
Concerning a thermocline layer, there are multiple layers in the ocean that effect sound waves. Those layers consist of different temperature layers, but also different layers based upon levels of salinity. Sound waves may travel great distances in one layer, but not at all in a neighboring layer. Submarines take advantage and hide in different layers.
Problem is the “West” as NEVER respected any treaty nor engagement : 2014-2015 about Ukraine, No-East expansion in exchange for absorption of East-Germany by West-Germany, Barbarossa, so many Israel engagements, Taiwan and other acts of Trump “the weather vane” and so on and so forth.
Why would Russia abandoned this big tactical-strategic-financial advantage for empty words on a throw away paper. Like the UK ambassador once said to a German ambassador peace proposition in 1940 “we know the Fuhrer guarantee guarantee nothing”.
I could easily see that this threat would encourage the Pentagon wackjobs to strike Russia hard and soon before too many of these are deployed. And bring USN subs even closer to Russian ports. So, this weapon inverts their desired conflict order … Russia first then China.
Of course, climate change flooding will depopulate many coastal cities anyway decades hence if we are “lucky”..
The best defense is missed out in this article. Preventing any of those subs ever leaving port. But of course that defence would likely result in nuclear missiles flying overhead.
Climate change doesn’t negate this though. A changing coast line would result in existing cities changing shape along the new coast line or new ones forming. There is a reason coastal cities have generally been so economically succesful and climate change does not alter the need for them.
What would prevent Russia from sharing this technology with China, considering their shared enemy?
After doing this analysis https://bmanalysis.substack.com/p/burevestnik-part-i-i on Burevestnik Black Mountain Analysis wants to publish one on Poseidon.
Lets see what they might add to above.
Yeah. The Black Mountain guy knows his stuff.
In order to negotiate limitation treaties, both parties need to have comparable weapons?
“Indivisibility of security in Europe” means the security of one nation is inseparable from other countries in its region. – Munich 2007, President Putin of Russia
18 years later and that simple message remains willfully ignored by NATO, it’s rules based order and imperial war purveyors.
Russia didn’t wait to be forcibly inducted into their American Dream, it read the writing on the wall and prepared to defend it’s own vision.
So far successfully and for the seventh time since Napoleon 1812.
Unfortunately for us, ‘our’ West is again failing while Russia is still standing
Further, it’s being noticed by non western nations who are abandoning the decaying West for a peaceful trade based co-existence like BRICS
No happy ending possible for the West now
Eg, 9th time since Wladyslas in 1612, perhaps?
Poseidon appears to be a defensive weapon intended to dampen recent western fantasies of a successful “first strike” by being survivable from a long range.
A second defensive benefit is that its existence might provoke the western powers into bankrupting themselves trying to come up with complicated defenses against it.
Poseidon doesn’t appear to be of much use for a “first” or “decapitation” strike since it can only hit coastal targets. As it appears intended as a deterrent, having grown up in a MAD world I’m not much alarmed by its existence.
Haig Hovaness: Because no existing defenses against Poseidon exist, the United States would have to create an entirely new, high-end undersea detection and interception architecture.
Something that may be nearer than people expect is Quantum Radar. That has the potential change the status of nuclear submarines in the nuclear triad, as it could end their strategic invisibility, particularly those relying on deep-sea concealment.
When I talk to people who deal with quantum technologies — it’s over my head — the attitude seems to be that it’s 2025 and this stuff is no longer science-fictional. The Chinese are apparently the research leaders, but the US, the UK, and the Australians, of all people, are in there.
https://thequantuminsider.com/2025/04/27/china-tests-drone-mounted-quantum-sensor-that-could-reshape-submarine-detection/
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/02/2-words-could-mean-the-end-of-the-stealth-submarine-age/
Aceh and Fukushima already established the principle, developed in 1946.
Clathrates boost the effect, a thousand fold, +3 on the M scale.
Rusty old freighters if in twos, and better, threes, with a few thousand tons of ANFO can replicate very cheaply.
Keep a close eye on N Korean ships!
FEAR!!!!! Buwhahahahahaha!
USA used a ceasefire to allow oil wells be sunk. Was this the rope for the noose?
the United States and the west generally have repeatedly demonstrated that they are not agreement capable. This is especially true with respect to relations with Russia. i can’t conceive of anything that could persuade the Russians to enter into an agreement that requires them to give up their substantial, and rapidly growing, advantage in strategic weapons. this is all the more true since international treaties usually are not ratified allowing the United States to insist that the pesky treaty really was not binding anyway.
VA-111 Shkval is existing conventional (meaning non-nuclear) torpedo that can reach 200 knots.
Two bits:
1) The “two weeks” on fallout mostly relates to radioactive iodine (nasty stuff) and is why potassium iodide pills are popular among certain groups. Some fallout is essentially forever, in human terms. Especially if the bomb goes off while on the seabed, which would bring up plenty of muck-converted-to-yuck. Lots of coastal cities have winds blowing inland which will help spread the MC2Y; and
2) Why only coastal cities? If the numbers are right – and I don’t doubt Haig – the thing is only “five to seven feet wide” which, I am confident, is quite ample to navigate well up the Mississippi, Missouri, Columbia (until the dam), and Delaware rivers. Among others. If the speed is moving at “a lot” (estimates vary, but all are high) then I doubt there’s much that could be done to stop it, short of maybe dropping grain barges crossways in front of it.