by Jack
It can stay aloft for a month or more, carry numerous nuclear warheads, travel at Mach 6+ and do it all while flying 50 feet above ground level. To make matters worse, it can’t be stopped with any known conventional weapons.
What is it? It’s a nuclear powered cruise missile! It can zip around the globe, selecting military and civilian targets to drop it’s deadly cargo on; just one missile could take out whole cities and kill millions in a nuclear flash. Even more devastating, it can be configured to release a wake of deadly radiation wherever it goes, eh, but this is optional, it’s a byproduct of its onboard nuclear reactor that provides its power.
Imagine this hyper-speed cruise missile flying back and forth over 10,000 square miles, spraying nuclear poison that will render the land beneath it uninhabitable for the next 1000 years. With every pass at mach 6, buildings and homes would shake apart under the shock wave, then radiation is rained down. A mach 6 shock wave is like a guided hurricane cutting a narrow swath. Pretty scary thought isn’t it?
This is not some futuristic fantasy, this is a real weapon and its here now. We (USA) developed it over 6 decades ago. At the time of its creation there was no technology on earth that could have detected this threat coming, much less stop it, and today this is still true! How do you stop something going mach 6? There’s no bullet, no jet and no rocket that can match that speed and still be controllable.
It was the ultimate doomsday weapon. But, we’re the good guys and we realized this was one weapon that should never be built. By 1964 we cancelled the program just before the maiden test flight. It was just too dangerous, too deadly too use and what if some other country stolen this technology…we didn’t want that genie to get out of the bottle! So for many years it was hidden away, a closely guarded secret and almost forgotten.
Now that technology is coming back to haunt us, because our fear has been realized, it’s in the hands of the Russians and Vladimir Putin. As far as I know, only the Russians have this missile…. so far. This is what Putin warned us about, several months ago. He said they had the ultimate weapon and he wasn’t kidding.
Are we about to see a new type of arms race? Only time will tell, but the thought of this technology being in Russian hands and possibly spreading to who knows where, is in a word… disturbing.
This thing is a thousand times more inhumane and lethal than biological or chemical weapon. I think it’s time to have a new Hague convention and ban the development of these weapons like we did for poison gas that pales by comparision. This is one weapon system that humanity can live without. (No pun intended.)