It said the weapon would cause radioactive contamination to make coastal areas unsuitable for military or economic activity “for a long time”.
Advertisement
A document describing the system was revealed in a November 10 Channel One news broadcast of President Vladimir Putin’s meeting with military chiefs in Sochi.
“It’s true that a few secret information was caught by the camera and therefore it was subsequently removed”, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, according to The Associated Press. “We hope that this won’t happen again”, he said.
That would be a type of thermonuclear warhead with a layer of cobalt-59, which on detonation would be transmuted into highly radioactive cobalt-60 with a half-life longer than five years.
The USA is developing the sea-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) system to counter the perceived threat of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles from Iran or another so-called “rogue” state.
Russian Federation is developing a nuclear torpedo under the project codenamed “Ocean Multipurpose System: Status-6”.
A nuclear torpedo was first mooted in the 1950s, with nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov proposing attacking the United States by creating radioactive tsunamis to contaminate the enemy’s coastline.
Status 6 itself appears to be a very big torpedo-shaped robotic mini-submarine – in other words an underwater drone – that can travel at speeds of 100 knots (115mph) and is so perfectly cloaked by stealth technology it would be invisible to acoustic tracking devices.
Mr Putin said: “References to Iran and North Korea nuclear threats are just a cover for the true goal (of NATO missile defence)”. A few observers, however, saw it as a deliberate leak.
Putin said the meeting would discuss the development of such weapon systems that would determine the outlook of the Russian Armed Forces for the next decade and will become a response to the challenges confronted by Russia.
A technical diagram shows what appears to be Status-6 mounted below the hull of the 155-meter-long Belgorod, a modified Oscar II-class nuclear-powered submarine converted by the Russian Navy for special tasks such as deep-sea rescue and research. The Russians say the plans could undermine Moscow’s second-strike capability, disrupting the nuclear balance between Russia and the United States.
Advertisement
There’s a great deal of speculation as to whether the images of the torpedo were really accidental, as the BBC notes that Russia’s Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported on several details of the weapon following the so-called “leak”.
