ABOVE IMAGE: The Russian Zircon, hypersonic missile.
It is probably no coincidence that as international tensions have ratcheted up following on the US missile strike on Syria and the US military deployments around North Korea, that Russia has announced that its new hypersonic Zircon anti-ship missile has achieved speeds of Mach 8 in tests.
This claim appears in an article carried by the official Russian news agency TASS.
Unlike other Russian news agencies and media outlets, TASS is and always has been the official news agency of the Russian government. Though its name refers to the USSR (Telegrafnoye agentstvo Sovetskogo Soyuza – “Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union”) it was actually set up by the tsarist government in 1902, when it was called the Commercial Telegraph Agency (TTA, Torgovo-Telegrafnoe Agentstvo). Following the fall of the USSR in 1992 it called itself for a time “ITAR-TASS” (“Information Telegraph Agency of Russia – TASS”) before reverting to its old and better known name TASS in 2014.
The point is that since TASS is the official news agency of the Russian government, articles which it carries have the official stamp of approval, and are especially authoritative.
On the subject of the Zircon test, it has been known for some time that Russia has been developing this hypersonic anti-ship missile.
TASS does not say when the test took place, but it does pointedly say that Zircon’s range is 400 kilometres – more than the current reported distance between the US navy and their presumed targets in North Korea (said to be 300 kilometres) – and that Zircon can be launched from existing launch platforms used by existing anti-ship missiles like Kalibr and Onyx, some of which are shore based.
The claim about the results of the test are made in this comment from an anonymous but undoubtedly high ranking source within the Russian defence complex
During the tests of the missile it was confirmed that its speed on the march reaches eight Mach (number that takes into account the dependence of the speed of sound on the altitude of flight – TASS)
The TASS article says that Zircon’s usual speed is Mach 4 to 6, and it seems from the above comment that the Mach 8 speed was achieved in unusual flight conditions. However TASS pointedly also says this
Hypersonic weapons are missiles and aircraft capable of reaching speeds of Mach 5 and more – or five times the speed of sound. They are extremely difficult to intercept due to their overwhelming speed and maneuvering capabilities.
The Russians of course know that US intelligence routinely scans articles in TASS for information about Russian weapons systems. It is difficult to avoid the impression that the article about the Zircon test is intentionally timed to remind the US after the Syrian missile strike and the US navy deployments near the Korean Peninsula that such moves are dangerous if made against Russia, and will shortly become (after Zircon is deployed) more dangerous still.
The author is The Duran's founding editor.
The world is literally hanging by a thread, nuclear war could start any moment. We’re not exaggerating.
(If you haven’t yet, be sure to read this: Experts: “In a nuclear war between the US and Russia, everybody in the world would die.”)
That said, it is imperative that those who do see what is going on, what is at stake, try and do something to derail the mad rush to Armageddon. There’s no time to organize Third Parties or a new party by normal processes. So we are stuck with the existing whores in the political class, and these abject people respond only to one thing: their own political and (maybe) personal survival. If these bastards see a mighty surge of people calling and demonstrating with clarity in their demands and anger on their lips, they may grow enough of a spine to stem the warmongering and actually begin to isolate the main carriers of this disease, sociopaths like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, the Clintons and their cliques, and of course, the Liar in Chief and his clique of insane billionaires and militarists.
So call, fax, write and demonstrate, and support the long overdue growth of an antiwar movement. Stopping a nuclear war is the foremost issue of our time. Call your Congress buffoon and state in clear terms that you are fed up, and that you want change or else, and that you won’t put up with any votes for more wars—anywhere.
This may sound counter-intuitive for us, to be advising you that you call your representative in a false democracy, a person obviously most likely doing the bidding of the plutocracy, those who brought humanity to this pass. But for reasons already mentioned, their own sense of short-term political self-preservation and opportunism, they may actually screw up the courage to do the right thing, for once, something these characters should have been doing all along without needing anyone to tell them to do the obvious. While you are at it, and if you can stomach it, also contact MoveOn.org and similarly pseudo democratic orgs, and challenge them to do the right thing or get lost. Please do this today. Or as soon as you can. Time is precious. Start by finding your Congressional (so-called) representative: http://www.house.gov/htbin/findrep
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DISCLAIMER
What will it take to bring America to live according to its own self image?
You will easily recall how several years ago, the US political establishment was all excited about attacking Iran. And … nothing happened. Well, I happened to be following US military analyses, independent of the official propaganda. It turned out that the US armchair warriors lost much of the appetite for war-mongering when they found out that Iran had lots of Russian lethal Sunburn SS missiles. At the time, they were virtually indestructible and had the additional scary advantage of being easily launchable from various platforms, including patrol boats and trucks. As Mark Gaffney said at the time: the SS-N-22 Sunburn,… Read more »
The problem with hypersonic missiles is that they depend on the kinetic force of gravity to reach that hypersonic speed. Powerful scalar interferometer blasts in the ionosphere: could reflect off the atmosphere with a huge blast and fry the electronics in the missiles. Or the same blast could be configured to produce intense magnetic fields to powerfully yank the missiles off-course. These things however, would pose a risk to power grids on the ground and other infrastructure, but if created like a sheet high up going horizontally, the ELF’s might dissipate before they hit the ground. In a nuclear war… Read more »
And this:
“Russia has unveiled the very first image of a new super-heavy thermonuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile, the RS-28 Sarmat. The Sarmat, designed to be fitted with a hypersonic glider warhead, is expected to go into production as early as 2018. The Sarmat is undergoing development at the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau in the city of Miass. The first image of the new prospective missile was declassified by the bureau on Sunday.”
Do the American government and NATO still want to f… around with the Russians?