Russia unveils hypersonic Fractional Orbital Bombardment System known as Sarmat ICBM

Eurasia News

Monitoring Desk: Russia has unveiled its new hypersonic Fractional Orbital Bombardment System known as Sarmat ICBM.

Russian President Vladimir Putin while addressing the Federal Assembly of Russian on Thursday played video of Sarmat ICBM during his speech and congratulated member of the Assembly for obtaining the new defence system.

“Sarmat system has virtually no range limit and will be able to attack across both the South and North Poles,” Putin said.

It may be mentioned that Sarmat system will replace the Soviet-era R-36M2 Voevoda (SS-18 Satan) ICBMs.

Fractional Orbital Bombardment System was a Soviet ICBM program in the 1960s that after launch would go into a low Earth orbit and would then de-orbit for an attack. The development of the FOBS was one of the first steps taken by the Soviet Union to utilize space for the delivery of nuclear warheads. The primary objective of the FOBS was to bypass the weapon detection systems in the United States. In order to accomplish this, the FOBS was designed to briefly place nuclear warheads into the Earth’s orbit. After orbiting for a short period of time, the bombs would deploy and fall to their targets from space. The system shares many similarities with the concept of kinetic bombardment systems, with the exception of the use of a nuclear warhead as opposed to an inert projectile. This weapon system also had no range limit and the orbital flight path would not reveal the target location. This would allow a path to North America over the South Pole, hitting targets from the south, which is the opposite direction from which NORAD early warning systems are oriented.

RS-28 Sarmat( PС Сармат) is liquid-fueled, MIRV-equipped, super-heavy thermonuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missile in development by the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau.

Russia unveils its new hypersonic Fractional Orbital Bombardment System known as Sarmat ICBM

Its large payload of about 10 tonnes would allow for up to 10 heavy warheads or 15 lighter ones or up to 24 hypersonic glide vehicles Yu-71/Yu-74 or a combination of warheads and massive amounts of countermeasures designed to defeat anti-missile systems; it was heralded by the Russian military as a response to the U.S. Prompt Global Strike.