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[Loud Whispers]

And he simply doesn't care that Mototola got upgraded to Samsung Galaxy

I'm going to hell for how hard I laughed at this, but I find myself struggling to feel bad for the man either.

Burned

(A lot)

[smjjames]

Russia claimsboasts new missile of theirs can wipe out a Texas or France sized area of the Earth.

Um, Russia, that's not a nuclear missile, that'd be like an ANTI-MATTER missile. We're talking about dinosaur killer asteroid yields here....

Also, I don't know who nicknamed it the Satan-2. If they want to boast, fine, but it'd be better to do more believeable claims.

[Sergarr]

The RS-28 Sarmat rocket "is capable of wiping out parts of the earth the size of Texas or France," Russian state news outlet Sputnik reported in May.

Oh yeah, those people. Yeah, they could say something like that. They sure like their stupidly hyperbolic statements about both Russian unconditional absolute supremacy and about NATO's "questionable" superiority over Russian military forces. Quite annoying, as you can see.

[smjjames]

Actually, nix that, we'd likely be talking about a life-ending (at least advanced life forms) impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater

[Baffler]

They probably don't mean "blown up" but "rendered unusable." Fallout is a terrible thing.

[Max™]

They mentioned 100 ton warheads.

100 tons of antimatter would be enough to get a Valkyrie to 0.1~0.2 c or so.

Now, warhead efficiency has pushed bit by bit towards 6 kt/kg, and there is no fucking way the Russians magically broke that barrier out of nowhere, so let's call it 500 Megatons. I can't find a calculator that lets me work with that so let's just do 5 ~100 Megaton blasts?



Methinks someone doesn't know how big things are?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Besides, if we really wanted to fuck everything up for everyone, we'd use cobalt salted nukes. Just a few of those could flood the atmosphere with radioactive material and be carried far beyond the blast site.

Some considerations suggest this may even be a risk with conventional nukes if they are used on cities. Essentially, 9/11 syndrome on a megascale, carried around by the jetstream and rained on everybody.

[Guardian G.I.]

Russia claimsboasts new missile of theirs can wipe out a Texas or France sized area of the Earth.
Um, Russia, that's not a nuclear missile, that'd be like an ANTI-MATTER missile. We're talking about dinosaur killer asteroid yields here....
Also, I don't know who nicknamed it the Satan-2. If they want to boast, fine, but it'd be better to do more believeable claims.

I wanted to see the gloating first-hand, so I went to the Russian state news website I occasionally visit, RIA Novosti. Looking up Satan or Sarmat brought no results, except one article about British and American tabloids freaking out. Vesti.ru had a brief article about the reveal of the missile's pictures on the 24th of October, citing the website of its developer; it had no claims about payloads, Texas or anything similar. Russian evening news from that day had nothing about missiles - they were too busy reporting about French migrant trouble in Calais and USAF striking civilians in Mosul.

Then I found the CNBC's article about that scary Putin missile - it cited some Sputnik's article from May 2016. Here it is - it cites an article from Zvezda's website (the channel of the Russian Armed Forces)... and here what it says:

Вопреки подходу разработчиков КБ «Южное» и академика Янгеля лично, создавших ракету, способную стирать с лица земли участки размером с Техас, создание РС-28 требует в первую очередь освоить более высокие скоростные показатели, благодаря которым станет возможно преодолевать любую существующую (и разрабатываемую на замену) систему противоракетной обороны какой бы то ни было страны.

So, it appears that the story originated like this:

• May 2016. Zvezda published an article about the development of Sarmat. The poor state of Texas was mentioned in the context of differences between principles of missile development in the USSR and today.
• Sputnik misread Zvezda's article and thought "previously missiles were made to destroy areas the size of Texas; the new missile must be different" meant "the new missile was designed to destroy Texas". They published an article about it, citing Zvezda's website.
• Cue late October 2016. A brief news item about the missile's pictures was posted on some Russian news site(s).
• Western media noticed that news item, and looked for additional information. They found that Sputnik's article, thought "Sputnik is a state-owned news website, hence it's an official statement sanctioned by Putin himself" and started writing alarmist articles. Some, like Daily Mail, even added bullshit claims like "Satan II will carry 40 Mt warheads" in process.
• All progressive mankind is shocked by the sheer bloodthirstiness of evil Putin's regime, which once again threatens peaceful NATO treaty countries with nuclear annihilation. No one knows Russian, so they can't verify these claims.

Мораль сей басни такова:

• Look for original sources;
• Read the source material carefully;
• Do not base your assumptions about what other country's media is saying on second-hand accounts.

[smjjames]

Мораль сей басни такова:

• Look for original sources;
• Read the source material carefully;
• Do not base your assumptions about what other country's media is saying on second-hand accounts.

Doesn't help that I can't read Russian, and Google Translate is bound to bork it up a bit.

[Sergarr]

I was still totally right on Sputnik being crazy, though. That means I win~

[Max™]

Thanks Russian reading friend, Thriend.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Мораль сей басни такова = the moral of the story is

I just asked my good friend поиск Гугл

(no I don't know any Russian, I'm just shitposting)

[Jimmy]

It's alright, the whole point of nuclear weapons is that they're so terrible nobody would ever consider using them.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Ukrainian Ranger]

Problem with Russian nukes is not that they are advanced or anything but the simple fact that there are a lot of them. And while current Russian nuclear arsenal is in a way worse than what USSR had in 1980s it is still more than enough to cause extinction of humans.

The world is much closer to a nuclear war than it ever was. USSR had an awful ideology but there were no millions of USSR citizens dreaming about nuking evil enemies. Modern Russia is a very different story. Huge chunk of their population wants to nuke the evil West.

[Sergarr]

Problem with Russian nukes is not that they are advanced or anything but the simple fact that there are a lot of them. And while current Russian nuclear arsenal is in a way worse than what USSR had in 1980s it is still more than enough to cause extinction of humans.

The world is much closer to a nuclear war than it ever was. USSR had an awful ideology but there were no millions of USSR citizens dreaming about nuking evil enemies. Modern Russia is a very different story. Huge chunk of their population wants to nuke the evil West.

What.

1) Nuclear arsenals are in no way ever close to being able to cause extinction of humans, not even the Cold War ones. They can cause hundreds on millions to die from immediate blast effects, and kill billions by the first year after it due to chain effects, but it won't be able to cause anything like "extinction". Humans are waaaaaay too distributed to be seriously in danger of that. All those rural independent communities in Africa are, for example, probably going to survive without even noticing that anything has happened.

2) Are... are you whitewashing USSR? Do you seriously think that, out of about, what, 200 million people within USSR, not even 1-2% of them dreamed of quickly destroying the evil of capitalism and finally bringing the light of communism over the world? In a state that has literally invented the "Iron Curtain", that had a powerful internal ministry dedicated to suppressing its own population, that had its border guards place main defences on the inside to shoot the constant stream of defectors... my father served in Border Guard, and during his very short one-ish-year service before he got moved to Afghanistan, he has personally killed one, and participated in elimination of at least two other people who have tried to run away from USSR - and he didn't talk much about that! These defectors were so fucking common that they in the Border Guard even had a professional sleng word to call them, "Yashki"!

Yeah, how about "no". USSR definitely had millions of people who were dreaming about nuking West. A state that supported such cruelties could not have possibly managed to avoid that.