I wonder if this, combined with recent problems with their space systems, are an indication of a much deeper systemic rot?
2 thoughts on “Russia’s ICBM Program”
Comments are closed.
I wonder if this, combined with recent problems with their space systems, are an indication of a much deeper systemic rot?
Comments are closed.
Well that particular ICBM program never made sense to me. Russia’s workforce aged a lot and there were few programs and investment for like two decades. The economy shrunk, with the fragmentation of the USSR, and a lot of the know how about hypergolic liquid propellant rocket engines was actually in the Ukraine. e.g. the Russians had to duplicate the Proton production infrastructure at great expense.
They already have the Topol and Yars solid propellant ICBMs. This huge hypergolic ICBM to replace the R-36 in silos never made much sense to me. As usual the Russians have a lot of parallel developments with minimal funding which never quite manage to die properly. I basically agree with Korolev that wasting money on hypergolics for ICBMs is a waste of money (he said that much in the 1960s). The Topol, Yars, and the Bulava are enough, these extra programs with hypergolics are all useless.
A deep cause of the problems is demographic collapse among ethnic slavs in Russia. The blog entry linked below suggests their best hope for staving this off is increased immigration from Ukraine. This suggests a novel explanation for their militarism there — they want the people.
http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.ca/2017/01/demographic-collapse-of-ethnic-russian.html