Moscow: Russian President Vladimir Putin by approving a Defense Ministry report has ordered for developing a preliminary design of a rail-mounted missile system,” the commander of the Strategic Missile Force, Lt. Gen. Sergey Karakayev said Wednesday.
Giving blue print of design of this train, General Karakayev compared a potential power of a “nuclear train” with several missiles to a division of stationery silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles.
It may be mentioned that Russia used to possess the intercontinental ballistic missile system RT-24 Yars (NATO designation: SS-24 Scalpel) disguised as an ordinary freight train, inherited from the Soviet Union. With Russia’s extremely vast railroad system, detection and preemptive destruction of that system was extremely difficult.
Within the framework of the START-II nuclear arms reduction treaty with the US, signed by President Boris Yeltsin and his US counterpart, George H. W. Bush in 1993, the SS-24 Scalpel system was decommissioned and all launching platforms were destroyed by 2007. The ‘New START’ treaty signed by presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama in 2011 does not limit the use of railway-based systems, so in 2012 Russia reconsidered development of a new version of a railway-based strategic missile system.
