Poseidon: what is Russia’s nuclear weapon capable of causing even a tsunami in the enemy
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday (29) that Russia had successfully tested a nuclear-powered drone considered a superweapon, just days after announcing the test of a nuclear-capable missile.
The Poseidon, the unmanned underwater drone, is one of Russia’s latest nuclear-capable missile projects, unveiled by Putin in 2018 as a clear message of deterrence to the West.
Putin stated that the Poseidon test took place on Tuesday (28).
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“There is nothing like it in the world in terms of the speed and depth of movement of this unmanned vehicle — and it is unlikely that there ever will be,” he said, adding that “there are no ways to intercept it.”
The president did not reveal where Poseidon was launched from or how far it reached, but mentioned that it “traveled for a certain amount of time.”
Poseidon is one of six Russian nuclear weapons projects, called superweapons by experts, revealed before the invasion of Ukraine as an apparent lever in disarmament talks with the United States.
The underwater drone, which is believed to be capable of traveling at 100 knots (about 185 km/h), was designed to evade defenses and cause a tsunami powerful enough to devastate a coastal town.
Some experts had doubted the weapon’s existence for years, following a leaked first appearance on Russian state television in 2015 during the broadcast of a meeting between Putin and Russian generals.
Putin said on Sunday that Russia had successfully tested the nuclear-capable Burevestnik missile and was preparing to deploy it. On Wednesday, he added that the missile had “incomparable advantages” and that its nuclear reactor would take “minutes or seconds” to activate.
The announcement came just days after a scheduled summit between President Donald Trump and Putin was canceled, an apparent collapse of negotiations for a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine.
Trump criticized the Russian president on Monday, saying the test of a nuclear-powered missile was “inappropriate” and called on the Kremlin to focus on peace talks. Putin did not react directly to Trump’s comments on Wednesday.
Putin also said that another Russian superweapon, the Sarmat intercontinental missile, would soon be put into combat service.
But it’s not clear whether Sarmat actually works. Satellite photos of a launch site in northwestern Russia indicated that the weapon failed to lift off and exploded in its silo, leaving a massive crater.
Dmitri Trenin, a veteran Russian political analyst known for conveying the Kremlin’s views, said in an op-ed for the newspaper that the Kremlin had failed to explain its view of the war to the Trump administration and that a “special diplomatic operation” to win over the U.S. president was essentially over.
