Since the whole point of a doomsday machine is lost if its kept a secret, Moscow has just ‘leaked’ to the world that it is building one such device called Status-6
Of course, the whole point of a doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret,” said Strangelove, to the Soviet Ambassador in Stanley Kubrick's classic film of the same name. Fifty years later, it would appear that the Russians have finally watched the movie.
Moscow doesn't want the United States to make the same mistake in real life, so it has just let us know that it is building a mini-doomsday machine. It wouldn't destroy the whole world, just a half a continent or thereabouts like, say, all of the United States, east of the Mississippi river, or all of China within 1,500 km of the coast.
It is awkward to say this sort of thing through diplomatic channels “I have the honour to inform Your Excellency that we can now destroy half of your country with only one explosion” — so the preferred method is to get the word out by an accidental “leak”. In this case, the leak occurred on November 10, in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, where Russian President Vladimir Putin was meeting with his senior military officers.
A cameraman for state-owned Channel One television “accidentally” filmed a General studying a poster of a new weapon called Status-6, a giant torpedo (a “robotic mini-submarine”, the poster called it) that can travel up to 10,000 km at high speed carrying a huge payload — like, for example, a truly gigantic thermonuclear weapon. And the film clip was broadcast all over Russia before the “mistake” was discovered.
The text on the poster was clearly legible. The “oceanic multi-purpose Status-6 system,” it said, is designed to “destroy important economic installations of the enemy in coastal areas and cause guaranteed devastating damage to the country's territory by creating wide areas of radioactive contamination, rendering them unusable for military, economic or other activity for a long time.”
“It's true some secret data got into the shot. Therefore, it was subsequently deleted,” said President Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov. But the complete text and a cut-away diagram of the Status-6 are now available on a hundred websites, and the Kremlin doesn't seem particularly upset.
Indeed, the Government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, later reported details of the weapon, without showing the diagram, and speculated that it would carry a gigantic cobalt bomb just like the doomsday machine in Dr Strangelove, although a little smaller.
The explosive core of the warhead would be a massive thermonuclear bomb perhaps as big as 100 megatonnes, almost twice as big as any bomb ever tested. Around this core would be wrapped a thick layer of cobalt-59, which on detonation would be transmuted into highly radioactive cobalt-60 with a half-life longer than five years.
“Everything living will be killed,” the paper said. Konstantin Sivkov of the Russian Geopolitical Academy, helpfully explained to the BBC Russian service that a warhead of up to 100 megatons would produce a tsunami up to 500 metres high, which together with the intense radiation would wipe out all living things up to 1,500 km deep inside the US territory.
This is crazy talk, but the Russians have always lived in fear that the United States might somehow develop the ability to destroy Russia, without suffering serious retaliation. And the truth is that the American military have never stopped looking for some way to do exactly that.
There is no realistic possibility that the American anti-ballistic missile defences could really destroy all or even most of Russia's missiles, but that is exactly what Mr Putin is saying to his Generals.