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Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Wednesday that his military has successfully tested an ICBM with the potential to carry a large nuclear payload, but the Pentagon said it posed no significant threat to the United States.
“This truly unique weapon will increase the combat potential of our armed forces, reliably ensure the security of Russia in the face of external threats and give food for thought to those who, in the heat of frenzied aggressive rhetoric, try to threaten our country,” Putin said in TV annotations.
The RS-28 Sarmat, dubbed “Satan 2” by NATO, is considered Russia’s most powerful ICBM: a super-heavy, thermonuclear-armed ICBM.
The missile, launched during a Russian state of the nation address in 2018, was the “next generation” of weapons capable of breaching “any missile defense system,” Putin claimed at the time.
West sends heavy weapons to Ukraine amid fighting in Donbass
Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters Wednesday that the United States did not view the weapon as a threat to Washington or its allies. Defense policy and strategy experts told The Washington Post that although the weapon sounds intimidating, the escalating threats Putin has made since his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24 should be more concerning.
The Sarmat was intended to replace the Soviet-designed Voevoda, which was designed in 1962 with the ability to carry three warheads. The Sarmat weighs 200 metric tons (220 tons) and has a longer range, allowing it to fly over the North or South Pole and hit targets anywhere in the world, Putin said in 2018. He added that the Sarmat has a larger number of more carries powerful nuclear warheads. The Pentagon minimized the weapon’s features, saying that “the American people should be assured that we are fully prepared.”
Russia initially planned to complete trials of Sarmat in 2021 and begin deploying it in the army soon after, but several test launches considered late-stage weapons development trials have been pushed back to 2022, the state-run Tass news agency reported last year Year.
“Sarmat is the most powerful missile with the longest range for destroying targets in the world, which will significantly increase the combat effectiveness of our country’s strategic nuclear forces,” Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Wednesday, announcing a successful test launch from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the Arkhangelsk region .
Putin praised Sarmat engineers for creating a purely “domestic” product in his speech on Wednesday. Rounds of economic sanctions imposed on Russia over the years, most recently over its invasion of Ukraine, have essentially prevented Russia from importing dual-use items that could help advance its military complex, and left many key industries struggling rely on imports, such as aviation, are vulnerable to production and maintenance disruptions.
The United States and Canada this week pledged to send more heavy weapons to Ukraine, and other nations have sent more tools to fight the Russian invasion.
Russia has always had a significant number of ICBMs that could hit the United States and Europe, said John Erath, senior policy director for the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.
Putin’s recent threats are more concerning than the gun itself, Erath said.
“We should be very concerned about this practice of threats as a tool of Russian politics [that] gaining importance,” Erath said.
According to Matthew Kroenig, associate director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and director of the Scowcroft Strategy Initiative, since the early 2000s the Kremlin’s strategy of “escalation to de-escalation” has included threats to use nuclear weapons.
Putin made nuclear threats during his 2014 invasion of Ukraine and warned other nations about the consequences of interference, said Kroenig, who is also a professor at Georgetown University.
“Every time Biden says he doesn’t want escalations with Russia … the strategy works,” Kroenig said. Putin “makes us cautious and limits our activities to try to avoid nuclear war. The flip side of this is that he doesn’t want nuclear war either. It’s bad for Putin, bad for Russia, bad for the war effort.”
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, the United States postponed and subsequently canceled a planned test of the Minuteman III ICBM, a decision made to ensure Russia did not misunderstand — or use as justification for — such a display of firepower an escalation of hostilities used in Ukraine.
Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said Russia has notified the United States in accordance with Russia’s commitments under New START, an arms control treaty governing such nuclear-capable weapons that expires in early 2026. The United States is not surprised by the test, he added.