Good background info. Much appreciated.
Also,The Sarmat has a range of 18,000 kilometers or just over 11,000 miles and can fly unpredictable routes while it is able to bypass missile defense areas. The missile has the ability to fly over the North and South Pole and even approach targets from directions that are not envisaged for interception.
Most worrisome for the U.S. military is that the Sarmat can be equipped to carry a number of reentry vehicles, including hypersonic Avangard gliders.
Anyway you look at it, those thinking we should get into a nuclear volley with Russia are absolutely crazy.
At one point, CCCP had roughly 55,000 nuclear warheads.
They played a game however. Or maybe more accurately, they played us like a piano.
As early as the mid 1960’s, before the formal NPT (1968), CCCP began quietly using “sleight of hand”, by hiding actual real numbers, and warhead power.
In anticipation of high pressure “reduction agreements/treaties”, and desiring to look good to Western creditors, there was a sudden reduction in known nuclear warheads from which CCCP would even have on the table in negotiations.
Of course today *formally we know quite a bit more about this, in part because of Bush 43, and much more so because of Trump 45.
Rather than negotiate with actual warhead numbers, Clinton would look the other way, while CCCP/CIS nuclear officials quietly and laterally moved many thousands of warheads from the Russian Strategic Rocket Forces over to the Russian Ministry of Energy. It happens multiple times. As such we were blind.
In doing so, these warheads were not part of nuclear weapons “negotiations”.
As well, they played games with us involving number of warheads on MIRV missile platforms.
Actual execution of this CCCP/CIS sleight of hand strategy did not happen with Reagan (or because of Reagan Doctrine).
This took place as the CCCP/CIS (same people/same authority) realized they could pull it off, largely due to their correct conclusion the leftist mass media and press would cover the failure up for Clinton (which they did).
As such, when we played along, Reagan’s “Trust but Verify” was gutted, as it was for all WMD’s. To this near totally gutted. There are many locations, installations, and facilities we still have never gained access to. Even cities.
Meanwhile, Clinton had RUsFed scientists and military crawling all over everything stateside. (So it wasn’t just Clinton and China (ChinaGate) by a very long shot).
Rather than destroy warheads, the Kremlin has been in a recycle/redevelopment phase since before Yeltsin was forced to appoint Putin as President. So not 1997/1998, but quietly surviving all of the 1990’s, with lateral movement and recycle programs extending back through Gorbachev and Putin.
To this day, we know a lot, but also know we don’t know a lot.
Another detrimental Putin involved effor—
*While young, Putin was one of Gorbachev’s most trusted KGB officers, and involved in multiple high level meetings between Gorbachev and Reagan, and Gorbachev and Supreme Soviet leadership and CCCP and later CIS military hierarchy.
He was also involved in planning early CIS architecture from 1987(ish). He and his team were also directly involved in recruitment and ties to both eventual German Chancellor’s Schroeder and Merkel.
Of course since then, Putin has placed Schroeder in leadership of 3 of Russia’s biggest and most valuable energy projects, including Gazprom and NS-2.
Putin team was also heavily involved in planning and creation of Gorbachev’s “Green Cross”, the organization which largely architected the UN’s “Global Warming/Climate Change” political structure, which included planning [from Rio to Paris summit’s], and multiple UN Agenda’s, including A-21, and WEF overlap)