Russian TV stations broadcast secret nuclear torpedo plans
Document was left out in view when NTV and Channel One filmed Vladimir Putin meeting with military officials in Sochi
The Kremlin has admitted that Russian television accidentally showed secret plans for a nuclear torpedo system on air. Two Kremlin-controlled channels, NTV and Channel One, showed a military official looking at a confidential document containing drawings and details of a weapons system called Status-6, designed by Rubin, a nuclear submarine construction company based in St Petersburg. The nuclear torpedoes, to be fired by submarines, would create “zones of extensive radioactive contamination making them unsuitable for military or economic activity for a long period”, says the document, which is clearly visible in the footage for several seconds.
The images were filmed during a meeting of President Vladimir Putin with military officials in the Black Sea city of Sochi on Monday.
The footage was aired on Tuesday and later deleted by the channels, but several websites still published screenshots from it.
“It’s true some secret data got into the shot, therefore it was subsequently deleted,” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told journalists.
“In future we will undoubtedly take preventive measures so this does not happen again.”
It remained unclear how the images ended up being broadcast on the tightly controlled channels.
The document was shown at a meeting where Putin warned that “Russia will take necessary retaliatory measures to strengthen the potential of our strategic nuclear forces”
*** The project is called “Ocean Multipurpose System ‘Status-6′” with the TsKB MT Rubin design bureau listed as the lead developer (Rubin is the design bureau that built virtually all submarines that are currently in service). A brief paragraph describes the mission of the proposed system as follows:
Damaging the important components of the adversary’s economy in a coastal area and inflicting unacceptable damage to a country’s territory by creating areas of wide radioactive contamination that would be unsuitable for military, economic, or other activity for long periods of time.
The picture that follows shows that at the core of the weapon system is an underwater autonomous drone (“self-propelled underwater craft” or SPA), which could be delivered by one of the two submarines – Project 09852 or Project 09851. For some reason, the drone is shown as attached to the bottom of the 09852 submarine, but not to the 09851 [UPDATE: Colleagues tell me that the vehicle attached to the 09582 sub is not the drone pictured later on the slide]. The text is hard to read, but it appears that Project 09852 submarine will carry four drones and Project 09852 – either 3 or 6. Given that 09852 is a smaller submarine (its displacement is shown as “10000 t” vs. what looks like a larger number for 09852), it’s probably 3. It certainly does not look like “1”, although “2” is a possibility. [UPDATE: I am told that a better quality photo shows that the number is “6”.]
Interestingly, these two submarines are relatively recent projects. Project 09852 was laid down at Sevmash in December 2012. It is said to use the hull of the Belgorod submarine of the Project 949A/Oscar II class. The first Project 09851 submarine, Khabarovsk, was laid down in July 2014. (Project 09851 was also mentioned in the R&D known as Kalitka-SMP.)
*** In 2013, the Pentagon decided: NO
http://www.defenseone.com/management/2013/10/no-more-nuclear-tipped-cruise-missiles/73010/The Pentagon is expected to decide soon whether to spend $30 billion on nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. Bad idea.
