Going beyond nuclear

Dmitry Orlov

On 21 November 2024 Russia performed a test of its new intermediate range missile system, which its designers called “Oreshnik”. This it had the right to do ever since Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, but didn’t use its right until now. Russia’s position was that it won’t violate the ABM treaty until the US does, which the US recently did by firing up its Aegis Ashore installation in Poland, which is an air defense system and as such entirely obsolete and useless, but which can also fire offensive Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Western media reported the Oreshnik strike as an attack on the city of Dnipro, which is actually Dnepropetrovsk. It was founded in 1776 on orders of Prince Potemkin and intended as the third, southern capital of the Russian Empire, after St. Petersburg and Moscow. Originally named Yekaterinoslav, in honor of Catherine the Great, it was renamed to Dnepropetrovsk by the Bolsheviks in 1926. Well, the Oreshnik strike was not on that city. That was fake news.

The Oreshnik strike was on a city-sized factory called Yuzhmash located near the city of Dnepropetrovsk. The factory is so large that it had its own transit system. It made ICBMS during the Soviet era. At its height, it produced 100 of them a year — one every three days. Under Ukrainian management it languished and although some US defense companies showed interest in it and even invested some funds in it, these probably got stolen just like everything else in the Ukraine these days.

The Oreshnik is a new system, developed over the past few years and first tested during its strike on Yuzhmash, which it smashed to rubble and pulverized. The Oreshnik is a non-nuclear solid fuel rocket with 6 hypersonic reentry vehicles. On reentry, the six projectiles maneuver violently and accelerate to Mach 10 making them impossible to intercept using any technology, existing or envisioned. It is highly accurate, packs a punch equivalent to its weight in TNT and concentrates it on a small area. Its range includes all of Europe including the UK and, if launched from Russian far east, Japan, South Korea and most of Alaska.

This was the first test of the system and the fact that it used a real target instead of a test target shows the level of confidence its makers had in it. It is also the first of several such systems in the pipeline, with different technical characteristics. The goal, obviously, is to be able to carry out strategic strikes using non-nuclear means and with global reach, and to do so with complete confidence that no air defense system will be able to affect them in any way.

The use of Oreshnik coincided with the use of ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles against Russian territory. A key point is that although launched from Ukrainian territory, these systems have to be operated by NATO personnel, implying that the US and the UK are now at war with Russia. To make matters worse, the Biden and Starmer administrations have given permission to use these rockets against “Russian territory,” although what they mean by “Russian territory” varies from what the Russian constitution defines: according to these NATO powers, Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhye, Kherson and Crimea are not Russian territory, but Kursk and Belgorod are. However, this is a distinction without a difference.

The missile attacks that Biden and Starmer had authorized have been almost entirely inconsequential because Russian air defense systems can and do shoot them down quite readily. Thus, in terms of achieving any military aims, be they tactical or strategic, these rockets are strictly a waste of time and money. However, they do serve as a useful casus belli from the Russian point of view, giving Russia a legal right to retaliate that would not be viewed as an act of unprovoked aggression by the global majority (which happens to be on Russia’s side and wants Russia to win).

It seems that now Russia has everything it could possibly want:

• All of what remains of the former Ukraine for a test range on which to test its new hypersonic rocket systems
• A weapon against which NATO can do nothing and which can reach all of Europe, including all of the UK, as well as Alaska, where the US has plenty of military assets
• A casus belli in the form of ATACMS and Storm Shadow rocket attacks on internationally recognized Russian territory that gives it the legal right to counterattack<
• A means of pursuing its tactical and strategic goals without escalating to a nuclear confrontation, since Oreshnik is a conventional weapon

Russia really has just one strategic goal: to defang the US and NATO so that they no longer have the ability to pose a threat to the security of the Russian Federation and its allies. Can Oreshnik be used to defang the US, and what would be the most efficacious way to do so?

Here I veer into guesswork, but my very strong hunch is that this can be accomplished by neutralizing the US military-industrial complex and Oreshnik isn’t quite the weapon of choice for achieving this goal because the assets in question are on US territory. But given that Oreshnik already has a mobile version as well as a silo-based version (typical Russian practice) there is no reason why a ship-based version couldn’t be developed as well, to be fired from halfway across the Atlantic Ocean.

The appropriate list of targets should not include government installations, since these typically house the products of the US military-industrial complex rather than its assets, and it is not a problem for it to make more of them. Instead, the target list should consist entirely of the industrial assets and sites of US defense contractors. That would inflict maximum pain, to the point of altering US foreign policy. In general, the more military conflict there is around the world, the better it is for the MIC. But the moment they see their own industrial assets being destroyed (which cannot be replaced quickly and sometimes not at all) they will start clamoring for peace.

In response to such a conventional attack by Russia, the US would have no good choices. It could go nuclear, thus assuring its own complete destruction from a Russian counterattack while Russia could very well shoot down most, perhaps even all, of what the US could throw at it, given that the US nuclear deterrent is quite old, subsonic and increasingly unreliable. It could stage an attack using conventional weapons, with even less of an effect. It could capitulate and sue for peace.

Thus, Russia is a year or two or three away from being able to eliminate the US and, with it, the rest of NATO, as peer competitors. As it stands already, Oreshnik has rendered NATO completely useless since none of its members can defend any of its other members from a Russian strike, nor can any of them retaliate for such a strike in any manner beyond the ineffectual or the suicidal. But the process of getting there is bound to be messy because of a severe shortage of people in positions of power, in the US or in Europe, who are capable of taking on board such facts.

Their modus operandi involves making horrible mistakes and then refusing to acquiesce in making them for as long as possible, hoping that everyone forgets and that they will escape responsibility. They may be expert at campaigning, public relations and advertising — herding idiots, that is — but military strategy is entirely beyond their abilities for the vast majority of them. And since they can only function through groupthink and can only communicate by reciting tried and tested platitudes about “stopping Russian aggression” and “sending a message to Putin,” the problem cannot be solved without taking it out of their hands entirely. The only hope is that the managers of financial capital which owns the US military industrial complex, seeing various bits of their industrial empire collapse into rubble, will demand that the government do something to cut their losses.

In a shootout with Americans, aim for their wallets. That’s the only part of their anatomies that can feel pain. Luckily, the Russian now seem to have a non-nuclear precision weapon that can do just that.

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Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/ec9e99a3-c664-4988-a25c-fee22f4601ad