RUSSIA’S HYPERSONIC MISSILES ARE KINETIC WEAPONS
Today's intriguing story was again submitted by V.T. (again with our gratitude), and I have to blog about it because it confirms an analysis of Russian missile capability, and what that country's hypersonic missiles really represent: an operational surface-to-surface kinetic weapon technology, or, to put it in its colloquial terms, they are "rods of God" technologies, a hypothesis I first advanced here:
This analysis was done shortly after the Russian missile strikes on Dnepropetrovsk in 2024, and my conclusions from examining the pictures from the strikes and doing my own amateur's "damage assessment analysis" convinced me of the following (and pardon the lengthy stroll down memory lane, but it's necessary in order to put today's article and blog into the proper context):
...what the Russians just demonstrated (is) that they do not need to arm their long range missiles with nuclear weapons to be able to destroy a target - and much will depend on aerial or satellite photographs of the damage done to the factories at Dnepropetrovsk, which, rest assured, the Russians have already taken and analyzed. The Russians have carried out strategic rocket strikes with the precision of artillery. They do not need to put nuclear weapons on their rockets because their precision does not require nuclear weapons for target suppression or destruction. Or to put it differently, the Russians have demonstrated strategic parity with the West regarding precision guided weapons. Now couple that ability to inter-continental ballistic missiles and you get the idea: the Russians have just told the west that they can drop their warheads down the chimneys of billionaire hidey-holes. And as for those warheads being conventional, it takes little research to discover that the Russians also have some very large and powerful conventional munitions, which one can only assume are adaptable to their missile delivery systems.
The upshot of all of this is that the message is "See? We don't even have to go nuclear to destroy strategic targets."
But is there another level to this message beyond my concerns with "warhead dispersion on target?" Indeed, there is. And indeed, target dispersion is probably the least of worries. The second level of worry is that these incoming warheads were hypersonic and coming in, as is visible on the video, at a very acute angle relative to the target plane. They were coming in at a high angle, just like the projectiles from those enormous German siege guns from the world wars that were used to smash hardened and fortified targets. And that high angle should give anyone pause, for in effect, that high angle, plus the sheer velocity of the warheads, means that the missiles might possibly function as a kind of rocket delivery system for the familiar kinetic weapon, "the rods of God." The Wikipedia article on Kinetic Bombardment notes that the United States air Force produced a report about using tungsten rods - twenty feet long and one foot in diameter - that would do nuclear-sized damage simply by the sheer kinetic energy of the impact, which would be around Mach 10, or 10 times the speed of sound. Other systems would impact slightly lower velocities. The advantage of such a weapon is that it has a very low radar cross section which, when coupled with its high impact velocity, makes it virtually impossible to intercept and defend against.
Which brings me to the second level of the message I think the Russians may have just
sent, the second deeper level of today's high octane speculation: perhaps the Russians have wedded four crucial strategic bombardment concepts: (1) Multiple targetable re-entry warheads, (2) precision targeting, (3) hyper-sonic warheads and delivery systems, and (4) kinetic impact warheads. Or to put it more simply, perhaps we're simply looking at "rods of God" technologies, but based on ground-based delivery systems, rather than orbital platforms. If that is the case, moreover, the Russians are also letting the world know that not only that they also have kinetic bombardment technology, but that its technology can be scaled for tactical, operational, or strategic purposes.
This brings us to today's article from RT:
What is extremely intriguing about this article is that it is a very similar analysis of the very same missile strike, and it comes to almost identical conclusions, though in this case it is obviously a Russian author and not an American one making the argument:
Just before dawn on November 21, 2024, a fireball streaked across the sky over the Dnieper River. It wasn’t a meteor. It wasn’t a drone.
The explosion that followed – precise, deep, and eerily silent on the surface – tore through the massive Yuzhmash defense facility in southeastern Ukraine. Footage of the strike spread within hours, picked apart by open-source analysts and intelligence services alike. But it wasn’t until Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed it that the world had a name for what it had witnessed:
Oreshnik – a new kind of Russian ballistic missile.
Capable of reaching speeds above Mach 10, surviving reentry temperatures of 4,000C, and delivering kinetic force that rivals tactical nuclear weapons, the Oreshnik isn’t just fast. It’s different.
In less than a year, it has moved from classified prototype to serial production, with confirmed plans for forward deployment in Belarus by the end of 2025. Its emergence suggests that Russia is rewriting the rules of strategic deterrence – not with treaty-breaking escalation, but with something quieter, subtler, and potentially just as decisive. (Emphasis added)
The first thing to note about the detailed analysis is this:
The missile that struck the Yuzhmash facility in Dnepropetrovsk (known in Ukraine as Dnipro) left behind no scorched landscape, no flattened perimeter. Instead, analysts examining satellite imagery noted a narrow impact zone, structural collapse below ground level, and almost surgical surface disruption. It wasn’t the scale of destruction that stood out – it was its shape. (emphasis added)
This is precisely the argument I advanced in various blogs and interviews back when the Tianjing chemical plant explosion occurred in 2015: when I saw the type and shape of the crater that was left when the plant exploded, I became immediately suspicious that the chemical plant's explosion was the cause of it, because the crater left was narrow, very conical, and very deep, whereas a chemical explosion would have been much more shallow. This led me to speculate that the primary damage may have been from the use of a kinetic weapon, a "rod of God", and the chemical explosion was caused by that weapon.
As noted above, the Russian author comes to a very similar conclusion on the Dnepropetrovsk strikes that I did, and for similar reasons states that the "message" sent was not being adequately perceived in the West, because the message was (and is) that Russia has completely recast strategic deterrence, and in the process, made nuclear weapons obsolescent because they are no longer needed for strategic strikes and levels of destruction:
Putin has stated that Oreshnik’s warheads can withstand reentry temperatures up to 4,000C. To survive such heat and remain stable at terminal speed, the payload would need to be encased in advanced composite materials – likely drawing on recent developments in heat-resistant ceramics and carbon-carbon structures used in hypersonic glide vehicles.
One of the defining features of the system is its ability to maintain hypersonic velocity during the final phase of flight. Unlike traditional ballistic warheads that decelerate as they descend, Oreshnik reportedly retains speeds exceeding Mach 10, possibly Mach 11, even in dense atmospheric layers. This enables it to strike with massive kinetic energy, increasing penetration and lethality without requiring a large explosive charge.
At such speeds, even a non-nuclear warhead becomes a strategic weapon. A concentrated high-velocity impact is enough to destroy command bunkers, radar sites, or missile silos. The weapon’s effectiveness doesn’t rely on blast radius, but on precise, high-energy delivery. That makes it both harder to detect and harder to intercept.
In doctrinal terms, Oreshnik represents a new category: A non-nuclear strategic ballistic missile. It occupies the space between conventional long-range strike systems and nuclear ICBMs – with enough reach, speed, and impact to alter battlefield calculations, but without crossing the nuclear threshold.
In other words, Mr. Trump, "we have stuff that goes way beyond nuclear too." In short, it is a "rod of God" technology in missile form, and thus, not needing any space-based platform for deployment. The other thing to note is that the Oreshnik also renders the "tactical nuclear" response option not necessarily obsolete, but redundant, since the Oreshnik can accomplish more or less the same thing, without escalation to nuclear levels. This gives Russia a range of response that the western nuclear powers - France and Great Britain - presumably do not have, and even the USA has only hinted at its possession of such technology, without demonstrating any delivery platform such as the Oreshnik.
The article makes one final point that is worth noting in respect to the previous considerations:
With a minimum range of 800km and a maximum reportedly almost 5,500, the Oreshnik stationed in Belarus would place virtually all of Central and Western Europe within reach. For Russia, it represents a non-nuclear forward deterrent. For NATO, it introduces a new class of threat – one that is fast, precise, and difficult to intercept, yet remains below the threshold of nuclear retaliation.
In other words, the Oreshnik platform is capable of targeting anything in Europe. But one must assume that the very same technology that makes the Oreshnik possible could be fused to Russia's intercontinental missiles, or that there is already under development an intercontinental hyper-sonic version of it, capable of striking targets anywhere, including the US. This would give Russia a strategic strike capability that need not escalate to nuclear levels, a rod of God technology that, wedded with Russia's enormous fuel-air bombs, would make the bunker busters recently used by the USA on Iran look like little more than a hand-grenade.
To make a long story short (and to toot my own horn a bit), it looks very much like Russia just confirmed my analysis of the Dnepropetrovsk strike, and that the strategic calculus has been altered again, this time not by the American invention and use of nuclear weapons, but by Russia, and the first demonstrable use of an operable kinetic weapons technology.
And no one seems to be getting the message... and that's the worst part of the story...
See you on the flip side...
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