Vladimir Putin has said that Russia has tested the ‘Poseidon’ – a nuclear torpedo that his propagandists claimed could drown Britain under a 1,600 ft wave of radioactive seawater.
Russia began producing the first warheads for the ‘Doomsday’ weapon in 2023, warning its enemies that they are ‘practically indestructible.’
The president said today: ‘For the first time, we managed not only to launch it with a launch engine from a carrier submarine, but also to launch the nuclear power unit on which this device passed a certain amount of time.’
Describing it as a ‘huge success’, he repeated again that there is ‘no way to intercept’ the drone.
Weather true – or part of Russia’s never-ending misinformation campaign -it is a message the West cannot ignore.
Both US and Russian officials have described Poseidon as an entirely new category of retaliatory weapon.
They have said it is capable of triggering radioactive seawater swells to render entire coastal cities uninhabitable.
Putin also alleged that the power of the Poseidon exceeded the 35-metre-long Sarmat intercontinental missile, which has been referred to in past reporting by various media outlets in and outside of Russia as ‘Satan II’.
This comes after the warleader held a nuclear launch drill last week – and on Sunday announced that Russia has successfully tested the Burevestnik.
The nuclear-powered cruise missile is designed to bypass existing defence systems, the Kremlin alleged.
Since first announcing the Poseidon and Burevestnik in 2018, Putin has cast them as a response to moves by the US to build a missile defence shield after it unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001, and to enlarge the Nato military alliance.
What do we know about the Poseidon?
There are few confirmed details about the Poseidon in the public domain.
The entire project has been shrouded in mystery ever since the Kremlin announced it.
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