By John Prager
Donald Trump recently
refused to implement sanctions against Russia, which is bad thing for a
number of reasons — but one of the major ones is the fact that he’s turning a
blind eye as news breaks that the Kremlin is developing a “doomsday weapon” that has the capability of
leveling U.S. cities from across the world.
On Friday, the Trump
administration released a report on the state of America’s nuclear arsenal.
NPR
reports:
But buried in the plan is a mention
of a mysterious Russian weapon called “Status-6.”
On paper, at least, Status-6 appears
to be a kind of doomsday device.
The report refers to it as “a new
intercontinental, nuclear-armed, nuclear-powered, undersea autonomous torpedo.”
“The radius of total or near-total
destruction is the size of a pretty large metropolitan area, actually,” says
Edward Geist, a Russia specialist at the Rand Corp. who has spent time
looking at the weapon.
“It’s difficult to imagine in normal
terms.”
Status-6 made its first public appearance in 2015, while Russian President Vladimir Putin was visiting with his generals in the city of Sochi.
Russia state television reported on
the visit. The camera shows Putin seated at a long table. Then it cuts to a
shot over one of the general’s shoulders. He is looking at what appears to be a
drawing of a new nuclear weapon called the Oceanic
Multipurpose System Status-6.
The torpedo is…big.
About 1/3 the length of a large Russian submarine big.
It’s also
nuclear-powered, so it can “roam for months and possibly even years beneath the
ocean without surfacing” — which is exactly what you don’t want to hear when
the subject is a warhead “thousands of times more powerful than the bombs
dropped at the end of World War II and more powerful than anything currently in
the U.S. and Russian arsenals.”
“The only possible
U.S. targets are large port cities,” says Mark Schneider, a senior analyst with
the National Institute for Public Policy. “The detonation of Status-6
in any of them would essentially wipe out their population into the far
suburbs.”
The Trump alliance
with the Kremlin is getting out of hand — especially if we are ignoring very
real threats like this.
Author John Prager is an
unfortunate Liberal soul who lives uncomfortably in the middle of a
Conservative hellscape.Prager spends much of his time poking Trump's
meth-addled, uneducated fans with a pointy stick and is currently writing a
book of muskrat recipes (not really) as well as putting together a scrapbook of
his favorite death threats. His life's aspiration is to rule the world with an
iron fist, or find that sock he's been looking for. Feel free to email him
at notjohnprager@gmail.com if
you have any questions or comments -- or drop him a line on Twitter or Facebook.
