How does Russia's most powerful nuclear missile work? SATAN SS18 (R36)

"Satan" is the name of the Russian intercontinental ballistic missile. It is in every respect the most powerful missile in the world, weighing more than 210 tons and over 34 meters long. The missile system with this ICBM is designed to hit all kinds of targets, including those protected by modern missile defenses.

The flight speed of this missile reaches more than 5 miles per second, which provides it with the ability to fly from Moscow to New York in 18 minutes.

An important advantage is the ability to use separable warheads and maneuverable monoblock warheads.

On board one missile can be 10 warheads with a power of 55 kilotons and then the missile can fly 7,000 miles, which is almost equal to the diameter of the earth.

If 10 such warheads attack New York City, it would have a target area of more than 1,000 square miles and would kill about 5 million people.

Or there could be one more powerful nuclear warhead on board, 20 megatons, in which case the missile could travel 10,000 miles, which exceeds the diameter of the earth by as much as a third.

If a 20 megaton nuclear warhead attacks New York, it could look like this. A massive nuclear explosion would kill about 5 million people. and the fallout would travel up the entire coast and reach the Canadian border.


The power of a salvo by a division of the Strategic Missile Forces armed with Satan is equal to the 13,000 bombs detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fifteen missiles of the complex were guaranteed to destroy the entire industrial potential of the United States. With the appearance of the first examples of this missile, the Soviet Union achieved true nuclear parity with the United States for the first time.

The weapon also had the advantage of being immune to the effects of electromagnetic pulse.
The missile's flight control system cannot be damaged by electromagnetic radiation pulses, because all the control systems of the "Satan" are duplicated, in addition to the electronic ones, by pneumatic automatons.

The missile consists of 3 components - the first stage, the second stage and the warhead.

The first and second stages are powerful engines that allow the rocket comparable in weight to 150 average passenger cars to leave the earth's atmosphere.

On the first stage you can see four nozzles, each one a separate engine. And the deflection of the engines, allows the rocket to correct the flight and have an accuracy of about a hundred meters.

The jet part of the rocket has been used by Russia not only for military purposes, with the help of this rocket you can put satellites into earth orbit, and also Russian scientists have put forward a proposal to modify the rocket to destroy approaching asteroids to earth.

But this is not the limit for Satan.
The rocket may well be used for short-range interplanetary transportation - delivery of cargo to the Moon, Mars and Venus. If necessary, Satan can deliver nuclear warheads there as well.

Today these missiles are being decommissioned and scrapped, but according to some sources there are still ten to fifty missiles that the Russian leadership has hidden from the U.S. and they are still on duty. Nevertheless, they are actively being replaced by the more advanced Sarmat missile with a vanguard warhead. This missile is almost impossible to intercept. I told about it in one of the videos on this channel, here is the link.

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