• Its deployment – if the move is for real – comes after only one proven test launch 
• The Armageddon weapon can be loaded with multiple nuclear warheads

By Will Stewart

Updated: 14:42, 1 September 2023

Vladimir Putin today put the world’s most powerful Armageddon nuclear rocket dubbed Satan-2 on combat duty.

The ‘unstoppable’ 15,880mph intercontinental missile system, known to Russians as Sarmat, is the size of a 14-storey tower block.

The announcement came from Yury Borisov, head of the Russian Space Agency.

‘The Sarmat strategic complex has been put on combat duty,’ he told students at an educational event.

He gave no further details.

Vladimir Putin today put the world’s most powerful Armageddon nuclear rocket dubbed Satan-2 on combat duty (pictured launching in April 2022)

In June the Russian leader threatened the West with his new Satan-II big-beast 208-ton nuclear apocalypse rocket while speaking to military graduates in the Grand Kremlin Palace

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The 208-ton missile had been due to go on duty at the end of last year but was mysteriously delayed.

Russian propagandists have boasted one strike could sink Britain under the sea.

The move comes as Russia is smarting from setbacks in the war in Ukraine, as Kyiv gains ground and subjects Putin’s territory to increasing drone attacks.

Yet its deployment – if the move is for real – comes after only one proven test launch.

Others were forecast but not announced.

It also comes soon after the Russian Space Agency faced international humiliation over its failed moon mission last month.

Nine months ago Putin threatened: ‘In the near future, Sarmat ICBMs will be put on combat duty for the first time.

‘We know there will be a certain delay in time but this does not change our plans – everything will be done.’

In June he boasted: ‘In the nearest future the first launch pads of Sarmat [Satan-2] with a new heavy missile will be put on combat duty…’

The Armageddon weapon can be loaded with multiple nuclear warheads.

Putin TV propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov – also deputy head of the company running state run Rossiya 1 channel – threatened Britain in revenge for a comment then premier Boris Johnson never made about striking Russia with a nuclear attack.

Downing Street dismissed the claim – widely repeated in Russia’ state media – as ‘another example of disinformation peddled by the Kremlin’, but it continues to be trumpeted in Moscow.

Russia has claimed its most potent nuclear missile, the 16,000mph hypersonic ‘Satan-2’, can destroy the UK

The giant missile – which can allegedly reach the UK in just three minutes and is known as Sarmat to Russians – has experienced embarrassing development delays

Putin’s ‘propagandist-in-chief’ Dmitry Kiselyov previously threatened to drown Britain twice in a radioactive tidal wave using Satan-2 missile

‘The island is so small that one Sarmat missile is enough to drown it once and for all,’ said Kiselyov.

‘Russian missile Sarmat [Satan-2], the world most powerful…is capable of … destroying an area the size of Texas or England.

‘A single launch, Boris, and there is no England anymore.

‘Once and for all.’

The first and only known full-scale test of Satan-2 was announced to great fanfare as soon as it took place on April 20, 2022, with Putin in touch by video-link.

The silo-based Satan-2 launch was from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome.

The following month, former head of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin, seen as a close Putin ally, said almost 50 Satan-2 missiles, which were in mass production, would soon be on combat duty.

In early June, a major ICBM test was scheduled and locals near the Kura test range were warned to stay clear of the target site in remote Kamchatka.

But this test never happened.

Russian propagandists have boasted one strike could sink Britain

On 25 June last year Rogozin boasted: ‘We are absolutely on schedule, we are now preparing for the second flight test of the Sarmat.’

The following month Rogozin was fired for unknown reasons with his promised new job yet to arrive.

His successor, ex-deputy premier Borisov, in July 2022 repeated the claim that the missile is in mass production without reiterating Putin’s goal of Satan-2 being on combat duty by December of last year.

Defence analysts suspecting hypersonic hyperbole pointed out that Russia’s R-36M2 Voevoda missile was tested no less than 17 times before it was put on combat duty.

Some experts will doubt the reality of today’s announcement.

Another missile – RT-2PM Topol – was tested a dozen times before deployment.

‘In this context, the truth of the terms bandied about by Rogozin — that Sarmat is in [serial] production and is soon to be placed on ‘combat duty’ — appear dubious,’ defence expert Leonid Nersisyan has said.

‘It is far likelier that Sarmat will undergo the same testing, prototyping and experimentation programme as its predecessors,’ he wrote in Shephard Media.

Russia takes its hypersonic Satan-2 [Sarmat] missile into a forest ahead of ‘new tests’ amid acute tension with the West

‘Actual acceptance of the ICBM into service with the Strategic Missile Forces …is hardly achievable by 2024.’

More than a year ago, Rogozin visited the Krasmash defence factory in Krasnoyarsk, in eastern Siberia, which he labelled the ‘Doomsday Plant’, to inspect the process of producing Satan-2 for flight tests.

The missile was rolled out into a forest for the cameras – and sabre-rattling Rogozin said: ‘The world’s most powerful global-range nuclear-tipped missile is being prepared for new tests.’

Yet there is no evidence these tests happened.

Are there any defences against intercontinental ballistic missiles?

A number of countries maintain anti-missile systems which aim to shoot down or destroy missiles before the are able to reach their intended targets.

But these systems are typically only effective against small numbers of missiles, travelling well below hypersonic speeds.

The advent of hypersonic missile technology and long-range ICBMs, such as Russia’s latest Sarmat missile, have made anti-missile systems largely redundant.

The U.S.’ Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation said that ‘despite decades of research, development, and testing, there remains no reliably effective anti-missile system to counter intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)’.

Existing missile defence systems, such as the U.S. Patriot system, can target incoming short-, medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles whose threat is localised to one region, but cannot effectively protect against nuclear-capable ICBMs such as the Sarmat that can deploy warheads across vast areas.

According to former Assistant Secretary of Defense and U.S. chief weapons evaluator Philip Coyle: ‘All missile defense systems can be overwhelmed… It is only if the attack is limited that the defense can have a hope of not being overwhelmed.’ 

In the early 2000s, the U.S. began work on developing a specialised system designed to intercept ICBMs, known as the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system.

This aims to use a range of sensors and radars, based in locations around the world and in space, to detect ICBM launches and destroy them out of the Earth’s atmosphere, before the warheads have a chance to re-enter and hit their targets. 

But the programme is wildly expensive and has returned extremely poor results, even in scripted tests in perfect conditions.

Comment What do the imbeciles in the U.K ,Europe and the U.S expect ? This NATO proxy war on Russia is about resources, control of Crimea, the Black Sea and castrating Russia. China needs to wake up and stop pandering to the not so Cloverley British Foreign Secretary. The west is not in the right here. If they want to do something about war crimes stop lecturing Russia about war crimes and release war crimes whistle blower to account. Then there is the matter of SAS murderers in Afghanistan. One could go on. Russia cannot put up with this NATO proxy war forever. They know that the latest drone attack came from Estonia, a NATO country next door. Nuclear World War III is ever closer.

R J Cook