Loading video...

Video Failed to Load

Go Home

The largest nuclear bomb in outer space exploded 64 yrs ago today. Starfish Prime was a 1.4 megaton thermonuclear warhead, detonated at the altitude the Space Station now orbits. It created man-made radiation belts that wrecked many satellites & lasted 5+ years. A year after the test the USA...

2,312,919 views • 24 days ago •via X (Twitter)

0 Comments

No comments available

Comments from the original post will appear here

Related Videos

On the Oreshnik and the eternal question about the warhead There is a particular type of commentator who, after every Oreshnik strike, routinely asks the same question. Was there even a warhead in it this time? The question is meant to suggest that the weapon, without a classical explosive payload, is somehow fake or less dangerous. What it really reveals is that the person asking does not understand how the system works. A conventional ballistic missile carries explosives or a nuclear warhead. The destruction comes from the detonation at the target. The missile is essentially the delivery service. The Oreshnik works differently. It is an intermediate-range missile (range around 5000 kilometers) carrying multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRV). These reentry vehicles enter the atmosphere at roughly Mach 10 to Mach 12, with Russian sources claiming higher in some cases. That works out to 3 to 3.5 kilometers per second on terminal approach. This is where the physics comes in. Kinetic energy is calculated as E = 0.5 times mass times velocity squared. Velocity enters the equation as a square. A reentry vehicle of a few hundred kilograms, on impact alone, releases energy in the range of several tons of TNT equivalent. With multiple submunitions per missile, that adds up. A tungsten or steel core entering the ground at this speed produces temperatures of several thousand degrees through friction and compression shock. Bunkers and hardened installations are not destroyed by an explosion, they are destroyed by the sheer force and heat of the impact itself. The technical term is kinetic penetration. Now to the actual answer for the warhead-askers. Yes, the Oreshnik is nuclear-capable. This was part of the design from the start, not a retrofit, but a built-in configuration option. Russian officials have stated this openly. The carrier is there. The only question is what it carries. But that is exactly the point the warhead-asker skips over. The whole point of the Oreshnik is that even in its conventional configuration it achieves an effect that previously required nuclear weapons against hardened targets. To destroy an underground command bunker, historically you needed a small tactical nuclear weapon. Today a reentry vehicle at Mach 10 with a few hundred kilograms of mass is enough. No radioactive fallout, no crossing of the nuclear threshold, no political price attached to a nuclear use. In a strike on a major city, the nuclear configuration would, in this conflict, almost certainly not be deployed. Not because it does not exist, but because it is neither necessary nor politically tenable for that purpose. The conventional version is sufficient to send a message without crossing the threshold above which entirely different chains of escalation are set in motion. In short. The question "was there a warhead in it?" misses the point. The Oreshnik does not need a large warhead, because its velocity is the weapon. It can carry a nuclear warhead, at any time. It just does not do so in the current conflict, because it does not have to.

Zlatti71

36,837 views • 2 months ago