October 13, 2005 :: BBC Worldwide Monitoring :: News
Russian state television has aired footage from the first test flight of the new Bulava ballistic missile, which test took place on September 27. The footage was apparently displayed on weekly current affairs program “Vesti Nedeli” on October 9.
“Here are declassified pictures of the first real firing of the brand new Bulava missile,” the presenter announced. He went on to explain how three rocket stages take the missile to a certain point where individually targeted warheads separate along with dozens of decoy warheads. Viewers were told that the Bulava is “virtually impossible to intercept, and is faster than all other equivalent missiles.”
The edition of Vesti Nedeli on the 2 October had quoted a senior naval commander, Adm Mikhail Zakharenko, the man in charge of the Bulava project, as saying that footage of the firing was being kept secret because of the missile’s uniqueness.
A word should be said here about the steady stream of reports—coming from President Putin to Sergey Ivanov all the way down—that Russia has supposedly devised new and “invulnerable” strategic systems which have been said to be deployed on the new Topol-M and Bulava missiles. One should take these reports seriously, and if new strategic weapons have been devised, we should consider what sort of strategic defenses are necessary to counter them.
At the same time, the Russian government may be exaggerating the capabilities of the new missiles and the payloads they deliver, especially by claiming that they are invulnerable to every conceivable missile defense. One purpose for such exaggeration would be to impair public or political support for missile defense programs here in the United States. If we may be made to think that missile defense is a technical implausibility, or at least that offensive systems have an inherent technological superiority to defensive ones, we may not pursue necessary defenses as aggressively or ambitiously as we should.
It is important to note, however, that all of the admittedly limited descriptions given of the Bulava and Topol-M capabilities suggest only midcourse or terminal phase maneuvering. Both missiles are still in their essence ballistic missiles, rather than cruise missiles, and as such remain quite vulnerable in what has always been the most vulnerable phase for ballistic missiles, the boost phase. During the boost phase, no release of countermeasures or exotic maneuvering (hypersonic or otherwise) is physically possible.
It is plausible that the new Russian ballistic missiles—and indeed, even older Russian missiles—are capable of evading the sort of ground-based midcourse defenses such as those being deployed in Alaska and California. In this sense, the Russian claims may be true—insofar as they are applied to the systems currently being pursued. But it remains quite doubtful that any ballistic missile could avoid boost phase defenses, were the United States to again pursue these seriously. The relative ease with which midcourse and terminal phase defenses can be overcome points to the importance of destroying missiles in their boost phase. Loose claims by Russia must not be interpreted as an excuse to abandon the pursuit of robust defenses. (Article)
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