Russia seems to be ready for war

Russian media outlets are running stories saying that the Russian Strategic Missile Force is going to keep itself occupied in 2016, completing a sum of 16 intercontinental ballistic rocket tests. This suggests a couple of evident conversation starters: Is that a considerable measure of tests? Is it true that we are all going to kick the bucket? Do I have to begin delving a reinforced hideout in my patio right now? The answers are, separately, yes, no, and it's confused. Most importantly, 16 tests of intercontinental ballistic rockets, or ICBMs, is a ton. A year ago, Russia led eight, and multiplying an atomic rocket test project is somewhat of a major ordeal. Of the arranged 16 tests, 14 will be for new frameworks, while the staying two dispatches are intended to test expanding the life of existing rockets. What, then, are the Russians testing? All things considered, they're trying street portable rockets, submarine-dispatched rockets, and starting the test project of their new substantial ICBM, which NATO calls the SS-X-30 Sarmat. "The rocket is in early periods of improvement and building," said Hans Kristensen, chief of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists.

There's a great deal of truly abnormal brain science and amusement hypothesis at work when you begin talking atomic discouragement, however one thing that makes immense measures of tension among individuals accountable for atomic combat hardware is, fundamentally, execution uneasiness. Atomic prevention is based on the thought that regardless of the possibility that you get a hop on me and bring me down, despite everything you're going to get taken out by that horrendous reaction I've kept away only for that event. The sweet spot for staying away from atomic end of the world is when both sides have enough atomic capacity to guarantee their countering will have full impact — however without having so much strike capacity that it makes a trepidation in your rival that the other person can get a sufficient hop on you to take both you and your retaliatory capacity out in a single killer blow. On the off chance that both sides think they have a solid second-strike capacity, however realize that their first strike would not thoroughly pulverize the adversary, then everyone is going to simply chill. As indicated by Jeffrey Lewis, a major nuke wonk at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, of the considerable number of sorts of atomic sneak assaults, Russian pioneers live in unending apprehension of a beheading strike. Kinda like it sounds, a beheading strike executes all the top managers, so that there's no one around to send the signs or discharge the dispatch codes for the retaliatory assault. Of the considerable number of apparatuses a nation continues hand to guarantee that a postponed activity strike hits the objective regardless of the fact that they've been taken out, submarine-dispatched atomic rockets are among the most intense. With max loadout, a US rocket sub conveys something like 288 warheads on 24 rockets; every warhead has around 25 times as much dangerous force as the Hiroshima bomb. Also, truly, anybody with an atomic rocket sub worth its salt (and the Russians have some great ones) can viably destroy a nation in the event that they put their brain to it. Accordingly, missing only one submarine in your amazement sneak assault means you're still in for an extraordinarily terrible countering. Enter US missile defense. According to the US, missile defense is important because a state that has nuclear weapons (say North Korea) and one that might one day (say Iran) might just be crazy enough to try nuking the US anyway, deterrence or not. Furthermore, the US says, the systems aren't aimed at Russia or China; there wouldn't be enough interceptors to make a noticeable dent in the cloud of incoming Russian or Chinese missiles to really help much anyway. But some Russians nuclear experts say those US claims are disingenuous, and that neither Iran nor North Korea are anywhere competent enough to launch a nuclear strike against America. But the Russians also note that the US missile defenses could, for instance, shoot down missiles launched from Russia's naval bastion, the one safe place where it could launch missiles from. So Russian fear boils down to the notion that the US could conceivably take out Moscow and top leadership in a surprise first-strike decapitation, and then rely on missile defenses to mop up the few missiles that did get launched in a counterattack. Thus, with these new ICBM tests, we can expect to see a lot of measures intended to give Russian warheads an edge against US defenses. But that has the effect of making the Russians less paranoid that a massive nuclear sneak attack form the Americans would work, and when people with the nukes are more chill, we're all more chill. Now, one of those new-fangled nukes is a big beast of a missile, the SS-X-30 Sarmat. Kristensen explained that the decision to pursue the Sarmat is "partially motivated by desire for a design that can deploy missile defense-evading payloads." And being a very heavy ICBM, the Sarmat could theoretically pack a whole lot of that. Related: China Has a New Hypersonic Glider That Could Deliver Nukes — But Can They Steer It? One of the cooler bits is the speculation that the Russians are going way, way back to their grandad's playbook for some vintage nuke tech and re-introducing the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, or FOBS. Many decades ago, even the US and Soviet Union could see that putting nukes in orbit was an absolutely destabilizing thing, because if you have nukes flying over your enemy's head, you could detonate one in space at any moment, frying electronics courtesy of the blast's electromagnetic pulse, and have free rein to nuke at will. So, in a rare bout of accord, both countries agreed that allowing any sort of weapon of mass destruction in space was just crazy talk, and they banned it. Sometime later, the Soviets took a hard look at the treaty language and noted that it only banned orbital weapons Weapons that went around the Earth in a complete orbit. But, they reasoned, if the weapons only went part of the way around before coming back to Earth, then they wouldn't be considered Nukes in Space, but merely Nukes with a Strange Deployment Method. The theory was nukes launched that way could come around the South Pole and hit the US without lighting up all the early warning radars strewn across Alaska and the Canadian Arctic. Eventually, the US got to putting up satellites to detect launches so the Soviets couldn't get away with any of this sneaky FOBS business, and the whole toolkit was put on ice in 1979. Anyhow, along comes missile defense. Missile defense systems are pretty limited in the area they can cover, so a missile coming out of central Russia is going to be way, way, way beyond the reach of interceptors based in Alaska. But, just to be on the safe side, perhaps hedging against potential sea- or air-based anti-missile systems, the Russians dusted off the FOBS idea. Or at least according to Major General Vladimir Vasilenko, former head of the Russian Defense Ministry's Fourth Central Scientific Research Institute. Now, Russia is a huge-ass country. There's no way that the US can possibly afford to cover the entire Russian perimeter with kit to shoot down missiles, so if Russian missiles can leave in any one of a number of directions, they'll be able to bypass US missile defenses, and the Russians will be confident in their retaliatory capability. That means they will probably chill out, according to that deterrence theory, and we can all die of something other than being nuked to death. Related: Russia Wants a Doomsday Device — And It's a Sign They're Losing Their Nuclear Marbles But here's the thing: It's not entirely certain if the Russians are going through all this hubbub because they're on to some sneaky US nefariousness or because they're downright paranoid. Which leads us to our third main question: Do I need to start digging a bomb shelter in my backyard right this instant? It's not certain that Russian concerns about missile defense are legit, but the Russian ICBM modernization is going along anyway as if they were. (Those efforts began in earnest in 1997, Kristensen said, so this isn't exactly a "new" move for Russia.) And as this Russian development program begins wrapping up, it so happens that the US nuclear modernization program will be kicking off in earnest. And based on concerns about all these new badass Russian missiles, it will probably be upgraded pretty substantially. What we have at the end of it all is a long series of back-and-forth, tit-for-tat moves that are actually only sort of related to each other, but, to the casual observer, look like a straight-up nuclear arms race. Which at this point it isn't, but it might take a life if its of its own and turn into a real arms race even if none of the participants wanted to race at all. So, if this were a sane, logical, and just world, there'd be no reason to start digging your fallout shelter right this instant. And all things considered, it doesn't look like you should. But looking into a side gig selling Geiger counters around the neighborhood might be a good idea.