Russia Wants This Mega Missile to Intimidate the West, but It Keeps Crashing

A Russian intercontinental A ballistic missile (ICBM) was fired from an underground silo in the country’s southern steppe on Friday, as part of a planned test to launch a dummy warhead into a distant impact zone nearly 4,000 miles away. The missile didn’t even reach 4,000 feet.

The Russian military remained silent about the accident, but the missile crash was seen and heard for miles around the Dombarovsky air base in Orenburg oblast, near the Russian-Kazakh border.

A video posted by Russian blog MilitaryRussia.ru on Telegram and widely shared on other social media platforms shows the missile veering off course immediately after launch before cartwheeling backwards, losing power, and then crashing a short distance from the launch site. The missile ejected a component before hitting the ground, possibly as part of a payload recovery sequence, according to Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva.

The crash was accompanied by a fireball and a noxious reddish-brown cloud, a telltale sign of a toxic mixture of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide used to fuel Russia’s most powerful ICBMs. Satellite images taken since Friday show a crater and burn scar near the missile silo.

Analysts say the circumstances of the launch suggest it was likely a test of Russia’s RS-28 Sarmat missile, a weapon designed to hit targets more than 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) away, making it the world’s longest-range missile.

An unusable weapon

The Sarmat missile is Russia’s next-generation ICBM, capable of carrying a payload of up to 10 large nuclear warheads, a combination of warheads and countermeasures, or hypersonic boost-glide vehicles, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Simply put, the Sarmat is a doomsday weapon designed for use in an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States.

It’s no wonder, then, that Russian officials like to tout Sarmat’s capabilities. Russian President Vladimir Putin called the Sarmat a “truly unique weapon” that “will give food for thought to those who, in the heat of aggressive and frenzied rhetoric, are trying to threaten our country.” Dmitry Rogozin, then head of the Russian space agency, called the Sarmat missile a “superweapon” after its first test flight in 2022.

So far, the uniqueness of the Sarmat missile is its propensity to fail. The missile’s first large-scale test flight in 2022 apparently went well, but the program has since suffered a series of consecutive failures, including a catastrophic explosion last year that destroyed the Sarmat missile’s underground silo in northern Russia.