Russian Intercontinental. A ballistic missile (ICBM) was launched from an underground silo in the country's southern steppe on Friday during a planned test to deliver a dummy warhead to a remote strike zone nearly 4,000 miles away. The missile didn't even make it 4,000 feet.
The Russian military has remained silent about the accident, but the missile impact was seen and heard for miles around the Dombarovsky airbase in the Orenburg region near the Russian-Kazakh border.
Video published Russian blog site MilitaryRussia.ru on Telegram and widely shared on other social media platforms, the rocket was shown to have veered off course immediately after launch, then flipped upside down, lost power, and then crashed near the launch pad. The missile ejected a component before hitting the ground, possibly as part of a payload salvage operation, said Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva.
The crash was accompanied by a fireball and a toxic reddish-brown cloud – a telltale sign of the toxic mixture of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide used to fuel Russia's most powerful intercontinental ballistic missiles. 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 the Russian RS-28 Sarmat missile, a weapon designed to strike targets more than 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) away, making it the world's longest-range missile.
Unusable weapon
The Sarmat missile is a Russian next-generation high-yield ICBM capable of carrying a payload of up to 10 large nuclear warheads, a combination of warheads and countermeasures, or hypersonic glide vehicles. according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Simply put, the Sarmat is a doomsday weapon designed for use in a full-scale nuclear war between Russia and the United States.
Therefore, it is not surprising that Russian officials love to talk about Sarmat’s capabilities. Russian President Vladimir Putin called the Sarmat “a truly unique weapon” that “will give food for thought to those who, in the heat of frenzied aggressive rhetoric, are trying to threaten our country.” Dmitry Rogozin, then head of the Russian space agency, called the Sarmat rocket a “superweapon” after its first test flight in 2022.
So far, the unique feature of the Sarmat missile is its tendency to fail. The rocket's first full-scale test flight in 2022 appears to have gone well, but the program has suffered a series of successive setbacks since then, most notably a catastrophic explosion last year that destroyed the underground silo of the Sarmat missile in the north of Russia.
