Russia has declassified the first image of its new “thermonuclear intercontinental ballistic missile.”

Sounds exciting, right? Well, not if you’re siding with the States this time around.

Flexing its military muscle as old-school Cold War tensions once again rear their ugly head, Russia’s RS-28 Sarmat missile – better known as Satan 2 – has a “payload capable of destroying an area the size of Texas.”

Oooooh, using an American state as an example. How dare they. According to Gizmodo:

The new weapon can deploy warheads of 40 megatons, or about 2,000 times as powerful as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagaski in 1945.

Former assistant secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy Dr. Paul Craig Roberts called the atomic bombs that Washington dropped on Japan “popguns” compared to today’s thermo-nuclear weapons.

“One Russian SS-18 wipes out three-fourths of New York state for thousands of years,” he said in a blog post. “Five or six of these ‘Satans’ as they are known by the US military, and the East Coast of the United States disappears.”

To make it even more frightening, the Satan 2 is also capable of evading radar defences and could travel far enough to strike the US East and West Coast.

So you wanna see Satan 2? Here we go:

It was published by chief designers at Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau, along with the following statement (rough translation):

In accordance with the Decree of the Government of the Russian Federation: On the state defence order for 2010 and the planning period 2012-2013. JSC SRC Makeyev instructed to begin the development of OCD Sarmat. In June 2011, the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation signed a state contract for OCD Sarmat. Prospective strategic missile systems (RKSN) Sarmat is created in order to secure and effective nuclear deterrent tasks of Russia’s strategic forces.

While it massively pisses me off that building such weapons is still a thing, I hate the way Russia has been spoken about during the USA presidential election and the flippant way Hillary Clinton uses it as a dividing factor.

[source:gizmodo]