Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Strongpoint]

Russian lawyer Michail Moesjailov warns that Russians buying S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 (which will release november 20th) are at risk of being charged with treason.

*thinking* If I buy a gift copy on Steam and send it to a "friend" from Russia, will FSB come to him?

[Random_Dragon]

You have to manually accept steam gifts, so...

[hector13]

That’s not buying it.

Though I’m saying this of a Russian legal system that appears to be manufacturing charges against people in order to compel them to agree to go fight, so…

[MonkeyHead]

Reports on the BBC website that an ICBM was used by Russia to hit the Dnipro region this morning. Seems like a deliberate response to the use of US/UK missiles to hit inside Russia.

[MaxTheFox]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/21/russia-fired-intercontinental-ballistic-missile-at-dnipro-says-ukraine

Not a nuclear ICBM, if it even was one. Had a mini heart attack.

Ukraine’s air force has said Russia fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at the city of Dnipro, which if confirmed would be the first time that the long-range weapon has been used in any armed conflict.

However, ABC News reported, citing western officials, that this was an exaggeration and the weapon used was in fact a shorter-range ballistic missile, similar to the types used repeatedly by Russia against Ukraine during the war.

The weapon was one of nine missiles launched at enterprises and critical infrastructure in the city between 5am and 7am from the Astrakhan region of Russia, meaning that it probably travelled more than 500 miles (800km) to reach its target.

[ChairmanPoo]

I mean, why tf would you use ONE interCONTINENTAL bm to deliver a payload (of any sort) to somewhere that is so close?

Even if they wanted to use nuclear weapons they'd probably use something faster and more short range.

[Great Order]

Maybe as a "We're serious, we'll use the nukes!" statement?

[Telgin]

The only reason I could see them using an ICBM would be to demonstrate that the missile works.  There's been a lot of speculation that Russia let their ICBMs and nuclear weapons decay to the point of uselessness, so it's a way to prove that's not true.

Well, it proves that the delivery vehicle works, anyway.  I imagine that people have stronger suspicions that the nuclear warheads are the real weak point, but they can't prove those work without detonating one.

[Great Order]

Has Russia withdrawn from the US-Russian mutual nuclear inspection thingymabob? I can't remember.

If they were fucked you'd think the US would be acting more aggressively if the inspections are ongoing. Hell, even if they're not actively going, if a good number were functional when they suspended it they'd still be very cautious.

[Starver]

The inspections are more to check that there aren't more than "a reasonable number" of warheads. With a decent scope to check that excess warheads haven't been sequestered out of sight, and monitoring the scheduled decommissioning of ones to make sure that it's a not a form of fake decommissioning. That and tracking the current and future production lines and critical supply chains (directly and remotely) to cover the possibility of a "hidden arsenal" as much as one can.

You can't really go "so... that active warhead you're planning on keeping: can we just open it up to check that it's not a dud/dummy". Or even "can you just explode <points at random> that one, that one and that one, so we know you're not rocking damp squibs..."

Arms inspections are just geared towards trying to prove an upper-limit of capability, not really a lower-limit. I'm sure there's effort put into this (also trying to work out if diversion of resources is doing funny things to the "what they have, where" official audits), but it's still more of a guessing game. The best info is probably getting verifiable internal (top secret) assessments by common espionage methods, but if your country is wanting to hide a weakness then 'accidentally' getting a fake-strong assessment leaked is probably part of that game, too.


Of course, what really is going on is way beyond my paygrade (one that I'vd never even had in the first place). Yet it'll be something like that, but probably even more layers of obfuscation and sneekiness.

[Lord Shonus]

The things that make weapons stop working properly aren't things that you can easily tell with an inspection. It is pretty common for failures to happen in places that you only see with a very deep teardown - the US accidentally shot down a B-52 years ago due to faulty connections to the then-new Sidewinder missiles on one kind of plane that all of the extensive preflight inspections had missed. Or you can have failures that only show up when something's actually actuating - stuck gimbals, clogged valves, etc. No casual compliance inspection is going to spot that. That's before you get into issues with the physics packages themselves where the difference between a proper detonation and a "fizzle" could be a molecular weight in the micrograms.


Inspections also stopped during COVID and then were suspended by Russia after this war broke out.

[anewaname]

In most ways, it doesn't matter how many of their nukes would work as intended. Using any sort of nuclear attack will not make the situation better for Russia and trying to use all of those nukes will not either.

Also, this ABC news article said

"A U.S. official confirmed to ABC News that the ballistic missile Russia fired at Dnipro contained MIRVs, or multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, meaning it had multiple warheads that hit the target."

and

Putin said Russia used "one of the newest Russian medium-range missile systems" in an attack on Ukraine, adding that it was a "ballistic missile with a non-nuclear hypersonic equipment" and that the "test was successful."

So this is probably just another type of conventional attack system meant to complicate things for Ukraine's missile defenses.

[EuchreJack]

Has Russia withdrawn from the US-Russian mutual nuclear inspection thingymabob? I can't remember.

If they were fucked you'd think the US would be acting more aggressively if the inspections are ongoing. Hell, even if they're not actively going, if a good number were functional when they suspended it they'd still be very cautious.

No, the US did.
Guess which US President did it...

[King Zultan]

I still think most of Russia's nukes are long gone and been replaced with cardboard cutouts.

[martinuzz]

Or with prisoners trained to fall from the sky while shouting BOOOOOM