Oreshnik – checkmate, or Armageddon?

Simplicius the Thinker opens his post today with this:

Swell of ‘WWIII’ Red Herrings Aims to Drown Out Mounting Russian Success

An outrageous deluge of exaggerated WWIII propaganda has hit the networks. Every pundit is tearing their hair out at a slew of canard-riddled reports, taken entirely out of context, deliberately misinterpreted, or pumped up in phony headlines for people who don’t read the actual article contents. Let’s debunk the three major ones …

The major canard-riddled reports (CRRs) in question being that (a) nuclear weapons may go to Kiev, (b) UK and French boots may be placed on Ukrainian or even Russian soil – nothing like a taste of cold steel to put Ivan in his place! – and/or (c) the West must brace itself for a nuclear strike by Russia.

I’ll start with CCR b: French and British infantry in direct engagement with the Russians. How many? They’d need to be in the hundreds of thousands to change the course of things. After nigh on three years of drip-fed media readjustment of public perceptions of the war’s progress – “Russia will get her ass kicked” … “it’s a stalemate” … “how mitigate Ukraine’s defeat? ” – it should be crystal clear that not even Starmer and Macron are so stupid as to commit ground forces more used, like the IDF, to fighting men in sandals with AK-47s than a war of attrition against a peer or, let’s be frank, superior adversary with a decisive advantage in materiel, and battle hardened to boot.

On CCR c, Simplicius traces “prepare-for-a-nuke-attack”  to a blowhard rear admiral of tertiary status – an “irrelevant pipsqueak” – in NATO. But in rejecting as “phony fear porn” Rob Bauer’s remarks, Simplicius may be missing a point both Jeffrey Sachs and Swiss Army Colonel Jacques Baud made just yesterday. Asked by Judge Napolitano for his take on the admiral’s nuclear braggadocia, Jeffrey was less dismissive than incensed.

Unlike Simplicius, he moves to a bigger point made also by Col. Baud to Nima Alkorshid. That Bauer can so shoot his mouth off without being slapped down directs us, says Professor Sachs, to the fact of a rudderless Washington. At heart a liberal of the old school, when liberalism had decency as well as backbone, ¹ Jeffrey approaches but baulks at recognising that, rudderless or not, we are talking of a criminal regime whether the name on the front door be Trump or Biden, Bush, Clinton or Obama.

All the same, on cue to corroborate the rudderless point are testosterone fuelled comments just days ago by another of Trump’s security appointees, the Islamophobic Sebastian Gorka. The judge shows a clip of National Security Advisor in waiting, Mike Waltz, affirming full continuity from Jake Sullivan on matters Ukraine. That’s bad enough but, at 12:50, Waltz segues into Gorka on how Team Trump will put that “murderous thug” Putin well and truly in his place. Let’s leave aside his offensive rhetoric (after all, Sleepy Joe takes some beating on that front) and save our aghast incredulity for the delusional hubris of assuming Washington is in any position to dictate how Biden’s war will end. Mr Putin, as I’ve said more than once – even before the full import of Oreshkin had sunk in – is well and truly in the driving seat.

Finally, CCR a – supply Kiev with nukes – is traced by Simplicius to a New York Times piece housing this gem:

Several [US and European] officials even suggested that Mr. Biden could return nuclear weapons to Ukraine that were taken from it after the fall of the Soviet Union. That would be an instant and enormous deterrent. But such a step would be complicated and have serious implications.

To which Simplicius responds:

This is either some insider troll-job or just outright amateurishness on behalf of the creative writer. How can Biden return Russian nukes to Ukraine? It doesn’t even make sense and is the most absurd of the current panic-inducing psyops.

It’s time, I think, to wrap up on this hallucinatory drivel. As S the T points out, all three canard riddled reports are fear porn clickbait whose sensationalist headlines are not even born out by the stories they herald – stories few will read, as the headline writers know full well – far less by anything we could remotely call reality.

But why the ballyhoo? Because everything changed last Thursday (Friday if you live further west) after the strike on a munitions factory in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro by the Oreshnik hypersonic missile, its significance still unfolding. First though, let me tidy up a few details. The Oreshnik’s maximum range, depending on payload, is not the 5,000 miles I gave in Hands up if you think Russia is bluffing but 5,000 kilometres. It’s always good to be accurate but this is a mere detail when every target in Western Europe, never mind Eastern, is within its range. In any case, when I opined that it could reach the USA – if “fired from the next generation of stealth submarines” – I was forgetting how vast Russia is, and assuming a strike from its Western regions. Fired from Siberia, Oreshnik could hit anywhere on America’s west coast and a good deal further inland or, with no payload at all – next paragraph – send an aircraft carrier to the sea bed faster than you can say USS Dwight Eisenhower.

Second, the Oreshnik has six warheads, as I reported, but I’d said each carries three devices to give a total of eighteen separately targetable explosions. In fact each warhead has six devices, nuclear or not, for a tally of thirty-six. I had followed Alexander Mercouris but in fairness to him he made clear at the time, just hours after the strike, that he was citing uncorroborated sources. In any case he was surely right on another point. At Mach 10 + such a missile needs no explosive device at all. The impact of four-ton metal rods at 8,000 mph enables them to destroy – bunker buster bombs on steroids – targets 200 metres underground. 

This points to something else. The sheer technical achievement on Russia’s part – with China likely on a par – puts both a decade ahead of the West. To take one example, the physics of preventing such a missile from self destructing on re-entering the atmosphere are apparently ground breaking. Does this matter, when they could simply be slowed down on re-entry – at which point any defensive action will be too late? See my earlier point. The ability to destroy targets deep underground – a nuclear silo, say – with or without a conventional or nuclear warhead, relies on the boffins having solved the problems of re-entering earth’s atmosphere.

Me, a weapons geek? Nope, just one who’s acquainted himself with enough elementary info to grasp how game-changing a message Moscow has delivered to the West. In his dialogue with Nima Alkorshid, Colonel Baud likens it to August 1945, when the US showed the world (Soviet Union in particular) it had a weapon no one else had, and from which no defence existed.

One last point. In general terms China and Russia had the incentive to go so far and so fast with hypersonics because, as I said in footnote 5 to Five things to know about Kiev’s ATACMS:

both have surpassed the US on hypersonic missiles to neutralise the US threat, potent a decade ago, of a first nuclear strike taking out the bulk of their own nukes while relying on “star wars” technologies to absorb a ‘dead hand’ retaliation by the remnants. There is no “star wars” defence against incoming missiles at Mach 10-20.

More specifically, Russia could lawfully develop the Oreshnik because Trump followed George Bush Jnr’s 2002 abrogation of the ABM Treaty, regulating anti-ballistic missiles, by walking away in 2019 from the INF Treaty regulating intermediate range missiles. (In which category the Oreshnik belongs, notwithstanding its ability to reach the USA.) Such own goals – from the same playbook as weaponising SWIFT, seizing dollars and even bullion from states incurring its displeasure, ² and pushing Beijing and Moscow into ever closer embrace while seeking the very opposite – show an empire whose desperate efforts to avert its decline only expedite, Oedipus Rex fashion, that outcome.

I’ll close with a certain Mike Adams, writing in East Asia Daily. I’m not sure being a professor of criminology in North Carolina confers instant erudition on matters ballistic, but his assessment chimes with those of others, like Colonel Baud, better qualified. And I have to hand it to Mike, he sure has a way with words:

The Russian Oreshnik weapon system is a checkmate for NATO and the United States. All American aircraft carriers can be destroyed in a matter of minutes. All US military bases, all underground bunkers, all ICBM launch pads, naval shipyards, etc. can be destroyed with NON-NUCLEAR kinetic energy using the “Hazel”. There are no existing treaties (as far as I know) prohibiting this weapon system, and it does not destroy the surrounding infrastructure or masses of civilians. It’s a devastating, unstoppable surgical strike weapon that essentially drops metallic lightning bolts from the sky like Thor’s hammer or God’s comet. No one has protection against it, and the range of this weapon, once installed on intercontinental accelerators, is global. Now the West must either retreat or switch to nuclear weapons. They will probably choose nuclear weapons out of desperation, be careful.

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1. In distinguishing ‘old school’ liberalism from that of today, I mean that the former was economically further removed from neoliberalism in its ‘globalist’ form, and from the idiocies of identity politics: idiocies both intrinsic (as in the transgender madness) and extrinsic in the sense of being weaponised to serve empire agendas.
2. Tough question, I know, but might you, in the shoes of a non Western government noting the theft of Iranian, Russian and Venezulean assets from Western vaults, see merit in stashing your country’s hard-earned somewhere less Washington pliant? Think BRICS.

   (I can’t say this too often. Once we’ve seen that we in the West do not live in meaningful democracies but under creditor oligarchies, it’s important not to commit the opposite error of supposing our rulers fiendishly clever. With a few exceptions they aren’t, and in any case there’s such a thing as organisational, or systemic, stupidity. Ask anyone who knows and has reflected on the corporate scene about its miraculous ability – once we factor in the endlessly conflictual agendas, mini-empire building and in-fighting factions – to deliver, on a daily basis, a whole considerably less than the sum of its parts.)