The SS-18 Satan is the worlds heaviest and most powerful IBM (Picture: Military Today)

Russia made the terrifying announcement this week that it had developed a nuclear warhead capable of destroying Britain twice over.

The Satan II, as the new RS-28 missile has been called, was said to come with a 40 Mt warhead, with enough power to wipe out an area the size of France.

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The announcement came with some other chilling statistics, such as a top speed of four and a half miles a second.

But while 40 Mt is massive (Hiroshima was only 15Kt), could it actually wipe out Britain twice over? Is it even possible to develop a weapon that powerful?


We thought we’d turn to an expert to clear a few of our questions up.



’40 Mt cannot wipe out Texas’

The Satan II is set to replace The Satan (above) (Picture: Shutterstock)

The good news is that nuclear armageddon through the dropping of one bomb is not a realistic possibility.

As Alex Wellerstein, an assistant professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, and maybe better known for creating NUKEMAP, pointed out to us that would require a huge payload.

’40 Mt cannot wipe out Texas.(which is more than twice as large as the UK)’. he said. ‘You can destroy quite a bit with such a weapon, but not something on the order of a state’ (apart from a smaller city-sized one like Rhode Island).

The reason? Well, because blast damage does not scale linearly but weight does.

The design for Satan II was leaked earlier this week (Picture: Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau)

Without bogging you down with science, a 40Mt weapon is only twice as damaging as a five megaton weapon but weighs eight time more.

What it also means is that a 40 Mt weapon would weigh nearly 8,000 kg – which is very heavy – Trident II missiles only weigh 350kg.

The assistant professor added: ‘Even if you had sixteen 40 Mt weapons, that does not add up to destroying an area the size of Texas, even if they were spaced at ideal distances at detonated at ideal heights.’

So what could destroy Texas or Britain for that matter?

This is what would actually happen if you dropped a 40Mt warhead (Picture: NukeMap)

Something very impractical.

‘If you wanted a single weapon that could ignite an area the size of Texas, it would require much higher yields,’ he said.

‘Studies done in the 1960s suggested that a weapon of 10,000 Mt yield (10 Gigatons) detonated 40 miles above the surface on a clear day, would release a thermal pulse to a distance of 320 miles. That’s about enough to do it.’

But the assistant professor estimates that a weapon that big would weigh something like a Space Shuttle – around two million kilograms.

He added: ‘The US looked into such weapons in the earlier part of the Cold War but never developed them, because it is much more efficient to have many “smaller” weapons (each of which can still destroy a city) than one big weapon (that is necessarily going to “waste” a lot of energy and be very heavy.’

And what about the 40Mt?

Both Russia and The US have the capability to wipe each other out (Picture: Alexei Druzhinin/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

The picture above, from NUKEMAP, estimates the fall out from a 40Mt bomb.

As you can see it wouldn’t come close to wiping out Britain once let alone twice.

But before you rest too easy it’s important to note that Russia and the United States definitely both have the nuclear capability to wipe each other out, as well as Britain.



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