Russia’s New Doomsday Torpedo

How Russia’s New Doomsday Torpedo Works

Kanyon can evade enemy defenses to destroy enemy fleets, cities.

By Kyle Mizokami

GETTY IMAGESGALERIE BILDERWELT

One of the five new nuclear weapons systems Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled last week was a terrible new doomsday torpedo that can cross entire oceans to deliver a multi-megaton punch. A video that originally part of Putin's presentation has surfaced on the Internet to explain how it works.


Images of the system known as Kanyon, or Status-6, were first leaked in 2015. The details sound so terrible there were initially doubts it was real, but those were put to rest last month when the weapon surfaced in the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review. Here’s the video:

Kanyon is a first-of-its-kind weapons system. Described as an intercontinental autonomous underwater vehicle with a thermonuclear warhead payload, Kanyon is approximately 80 feet long and torpedo-shaped. As the video shows, it uses four propellers to reach speed up to 100 knots (115 mph).

Kanyon is carried by a mother submarine and can be released thousands of miles from its target. The weapon is self-guiding, meaning once launched it doesn’t rely on guidance commands. It can steer around obstacles by varying the pitch of individual propellers. Being nuclear-powered, it is almost certainly a noisy and easily detectable weapon, but its sheer speed makes it difficult to intercept.

Once Kanyon has arrived at its destination, it detonates a 100-megaton thermonuclear warhead. Against sea-based targets like an aircraft carrier battle group, this is likely powerful enough that the weapon can detonate miles from actual enemy fleet and still destroy it. Although carrier battle groups would typically have anti-submarine screens up and running in wartime, Kanyon’s high speed and ability to kill at a distance would give defending forces very little time to react.

Against a land target like the San Francisco Bay Area, Kanyon would be far more devastating: a Kanyon self-detonating at the Golden Gate Bridge would completely obliterate San Francisco, killing 1.3 million across Northern California and injuring another 1.1 million, with a dangerous cloud of radiation spreading as far east as Montana. Kanyon is also allegedly a “salted” bomb that includes dangerous, long-lasting radioactive isotopes that practically “salt” the earth (think Carthage), making them uninhabitable.

Kanyon, like the rest of Putin’s superweapons, is designed to get around American anti-missile defenses. Although the U.S. ballistic missile shield is too weak to protect against an all-out Russian nuclear attack, from Moscow’s perspective anything that could conceivably be used to undermine the concept of nuclear deterrence is a danger to the country’s security.