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| SSN Jimmy Carter enters port flying the Jolly Roger in September 2017. The Seawolf Class submarine is equipped to “find” objects on the ocean floor and deal with them or retrieve them. |
Has the US already recovered the Burevestnik nuclear powered and armed Russian cruise missile that came down in the Barents Sea in 2017?
I can hardly speculate because I know very little of such things, but that’s what blogging is all about…isn’t it?
The real question is HOW MANY missiles are the Russians missing? And who will find them all first?
CNBC was first to report the Russian expedition, citing unnamed U.S. government sources with knowledge of an American intelligence report on the matter, on Aug. 21, 2018. These individuals said that the Kremlin would dispatch three unspecified ships, including one specially configured to recover the missile’s nuclear reactor, but said there was no set timeline for when the operation would begin or how long it might last.
Russia test-fired four Burevestniks in total between September 2017 and February 2018, according to the new information. The longest test flight reportedly lasted over two minutes and saw the weapon travel a total of 22 miles, while the shortest experiment saw the missile fail within seconds, but it still managed to cover a distance of five miles. The missile reportedly uses a nuclear reactor to power its propulsion system, giving it theoretically unlimited range.
The Russians have otherwise been very tight-lipped about the design (read more about it here). So, it’s not surprising that they would want to recover any wrecks both to prevent foreign intelligence services from getting their hands on it and to gather more information for their test program.
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| Yantar |
The Yantar is said to be among those ships engaged in the search. Officially an “oceanographic research vessel,” this spy ship has specialized equipment that can reportedly tap or cut submarine cables and investigate and retrieve objects from depths of up to 18,000 feet.
In 2017, the vessel reportedly sailed off the coast of Syria to recover the remnants of two fighter jets, a Su-33 and a Mig-29KR, that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea during operations from Russia’s aircraft carrier Kuznetsov. In that case, the goal was also, at least in part, to make sure other countries could not retrieve the wrecks for their own purposes.
A missile with a nuclear powerplant — sounds kind of 1950s…
'I can hardly speculate because I know very little of such things'
Yeah, right.
Brings back memories of a certain ASW exercise off the coast of Hawaii in 1974 when we provided cover for the Glomar Explorer
The Russians have thrown a lot of energy (pun intended) into the development of a nuclear powered cruise missile, but the results to date have been disappointing for them. Somewhere in some gray, windowless, concrete building in the US, scientists have torn it apart and could tell you why it didn't work. I would like to be a fly on the wall, but the filtration system would likely kill me – if I was a fly on the wall of the lab.
When the USSR fell, USGOV drained the place of its secrets – and paid to do that. The Russians are still smarting from that activity and while Vlad and the lads don't come out and say it – it did happen. The humiliation that Russia experienced is manifest in what they're doing today in an effort to regain lost territory. Their new secret missile is one of their more recent moves to bounce ahead of the US, which made great secret strides even during the eight miserable years of Obamanation.
The USS Parche and Operation Ivy Bells, now declassified, shows early US efforts to pick things up and put things down in Soviet territory. The Glomar Explorer effort is another. I expect that we're better at doing these things today than we were forty years ago.
Yep, if Yantar is out, they've lost 'something'… I know nozzink about Hawaii and ASW… :-)
They've lost a few nothings. And since the bottom of the Bering Sea is said to be 10 feet of sonobuoys, they're likely buried…