Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Russia Preparing for Nuclear Attacks on U.S, Britain
newsmax.com ^ | Sunday, May 18, 2003 | newsmax.com

Posted on 05/18/2003 6:19:16 PM PDT by paltz

Russia will "launch" a mock nuclear attack against the U.S. and Britain during military exercises over the next week.

Moscow's Nezavisimaya Gazeta reports that Russia's strategic bombers and nuclear submarines "will deliver hypothetical nuclear strikes on the U.S. and Britain, while locating and destroying aircraft-carrier groups of the U.S. Navy."

The massive air, sea and land maneuvers are being conducted in the wake of America's stunning victory over Iraq, a longtime client state of Russia.

If the mock strikes were real, they would kill 125 million Americans in the first three days of such an attack, with tens of millions more casualties in the weeks after.

The paper said the exercises are taking place because "Russian military leaders have learned a lesson from the Iraq war, and intend to show the U.S. and its allies their determination to repel any potential threat coming from the West."

The Russian military, in plans drawn up at the request of President Vladimir Putin, argues that the only way Russia can deal with an escalating regional conflict with the U.S. would be to employ nuclear weapons.

Though Russia's military has been considerably downsized since the end of the Cold War and its conventional forces hold little weight against a modern equipped army, Russia has continued to invest heavily in strategic and tactical nuclear weapons.

Sometime during the '90s, Russia attained nuclear superiority over the U.S. While Russia's large strategic nuclear weapons have remained in parity with the those of the U.S., Russia's tactical nuclear arsenal has been estimated to include 20,000 to 40,000 weapons.

At the same time Russia has continued its nuclear buildup, the U.S. has virtually destroyed its arsenal of tactical nuclear warheads. Under orders from the Bush administration, the U.S. also has been moving to further reduce the U.S. strategic arsenal. Currently, the nation's most modern fleet of ICBM, the MX missiles, is being destroyed.

The Russian military exercises show a desire by the Russian military to deal with the huge technological lead U.S. conventional forces have, demonstrated by Operation Iraqi Freedom.

According to Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the Russian exercises "will be linked with destroying the U.S. satellite group in order to neutralize the NAVSTAR global navigation system, the Keyhole optoelectronic intelligence satellites, and the Lacross radio-locating intelligence satellites."

The paper said about these maneuvers: "Under actual conditions of a war this would 'blind' the Pentagon and does not let the U.S. use high-precision weapons against Russian military groups."

So far, the exercises are to include Four Tu-160 and nine Tu-95MS strategic bombers, 12 Tu-22M3 long-range bombers, and four Il-78 flying tankers will be involved in the maneuvers on May 17-18.

The maneuvers are of a "global scale," the paper said.

Major-General Igor Khvorov, commander of the 37th air army of the High Commander-in-Chief, said that the official objective of the exercise is to polish cooperation between long-range aviation, the navy and other branches of the army in the western, eastern, northern and southern regions of the Russian Federation, and over the world's oceans. This emphasizes the global scale of the impending maneuvers.

Submarines of the Northern and Pacific fleets will launch ballistic missiles. Nuclear strategic and multi-purpose submarines, surface warships of different types, coastal missile and anti-aircraft units, and the missile-carrying, pursuit and anti-submarine aviation will be involved in the exercise.

The paper also noted that Russian warships sent to the Arabian Sea to take part in an exercise with the Indian navy will support strategic units. They will find and destroy U.S. Los Angeles-class submarines and deliver missile strikes at enemy warships.


TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events; Russia; United Kingdom
KEYWORDS:
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-8081-85 next last
To: Poohbah; paltz
Easy boys -- I'm getting a bit of pee spritzed on my screen ;-)
21 posted on 05/18/2003 7:47:11 PM PDT by F16Fighter (Democrats -- The Party of Stalin and Chiraq)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 18 | View Replies]

To: Poohbah
You gotta accept the fact (as even Servo has, I believe) that the one "suck thing" about Freep is the Search.

Time to put ice on it and move on.

22 posted on 05/18/2003 7:47:45 PM PDT by ErnBatavia (Bumperootus!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 19 | View Replies]

To: ErnBatavia
You gotta accept the fact (as even Servo has, I believe) that the one "suck thing" about Freep is the Search.

I've never had problems with it.

What's everyone else's beef?

23 posted on 05/18/2003 7:49:36 PM PDT by Poohbah (Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 22 | View Replies]

To: jungleboy
That was on the USS Belleau Wood, we had a crash on the flight deck Mar 3, and this flyover was the next day, Mar 4, 1981.

They wanted to see the damage to the aircraft and ship for their reports.
24 posted on 05/18/2003 7:56:00 PM PDT by RaceBannon
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 17 | View Replies]

To: Poohbah
What's everyone else's beef?

FR 'search' is unreliable. Many of us have demonstrated that fact.

25 posted on 05/18/2003 7:57:45 PM PDT by jimkress
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 23 | View Replies]

To: RaceBannon
We use to sneak into harbors and periscope-photo ships.
26 posted on 05/18/2003 7:59:08 PM PDT by jungleboy
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 24 | View Replies]

To: Poohbah
What's everyone else's beef?

And on top of everything, you add insult to injury and make me hongry...for:

27 posted on 05/18/2003 8:16:23 PM PDT by ErnBatavia (Bumperootus!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 23 | View Replies]

To: ErnBatavia
I'm a Wendy's man, myself :o)
28 posted on 05/18/2003 8:19:19 PM PDT by Poohbah (Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 27 | View Replies]

To: goody2shooz
In reality would they actually be able to pull this off without getting smacked back hard by us?

The ABM treaty the US signed with the USSR allowed for anti-ballistic missile missiles to be placed in a ring around Moscow, and at the ICBM 'farms' of the US.  

What does this tell us?

1.  The USSR had not need to protect their ICBMs from attack because
      if they strike first, there are not missiles left in the silos.  They opted
      to protect Moscow for the counterstrike.
2.  The US placed ABMs at the silos to protect them from a first strike, allowing
     for a counterstrike.  American cities were left unprotected.

Draw your own conclusions as to who is most likely to strike first.
29 posted on 05/18/2003 8:34:19 PM PDT by gcruse (Vice is nice, but virtue can hurt you. --Bill Bennett)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: Poohbah

Did somebody say Wendy's?

30 posted on 05/18/2003 8:39:00 PM PDT by PokeyJoe (MS Windows TCP/IP stack was lifted from BSD)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 28 | View Replies]

To: PokeyJoe
Don't get me started :o)
31 posted on 05/18/2003 8:39:40 PM PDT by Poohbah (Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 30 | View Replies]

To: paltz
How 'bout we put some "simulated" ICBM's online pointing towards the Mutha-**-land, send some Trident's to disappear to sea, and open up a half dozen new bases with our new friends in Poland, the Baltics, maybe the Czech's, Hungarians, etc..

Just .."simulated", ya know? We'd just be playing games with our Russian buddies.

Russia/mid 1980's: Been there, done that, had a nice swim ... and got the pictures.

FReegards..SFS

32 posted on 05/18/2003 8:45:33 PM PDT by Steel and Fire and Stone
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Steel and Fire and Stone
We run exercises all the time.

They run exercises all the time.

No big.
33 posted on 05/18/2003 8:47:57 PM PDT by Poohbah (Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 32 | View Replies]

To: Poohbah
I wish the "duplicate post" police would just stow it. Maybe they have the luxury of monitoring FreeRepublic anytime, all the time, for interesting threads, but I don't. I can only log-on for an hour or two a day, and don't have time to scroll through the past 22 hours of threads for topics that interest me. I say, THANK GOD for duplicate posts, otherwise I'd miss out on some interesting stuff.
34 posted on 05/18/2003 9:41:38 PM PDT by Finny (God continue to Bless G.W. Bush with wisdom, popularity, and victory. Amen.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies]

To: Poohbah
Yeah.. on second thought, the CIC USA should do NOTHING, say NOTHING other than:

"Oh.. you mean the Russians had an exercise? We hadn't noticed.

Where they able to get BOTH of their operatable ships to sea this time? Good for them!

Nothing worse than holding an big, important exercise, making all that noise, and then being IGNORED by your "enemy" because your so-called "armed forces" are of such little gravity to the US defense equation.

FReegards .. SFS

35 posted on 05/18/2003 9:52:35 PM PDT by Steel and Fire and Stone
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 33 | View Replies]

To: paltz
Russia has continued to invest heavily in strategic and tactical nuclear weapons.

Sometime during the '90s, Russia attained nuclear superiority over the U.S. While Russia's large strategic nuclear weapons have remained in parity with the those of the U.S., Russia's tactical nuclear arsenal has been estimated to include 20,000 to 40,000 weapons.

Funny how they have so much money to waste on these things when Russia's infrastructure requires major repair and the situation of the conventional armed forces is so pathetically poor.

Maybe Putin should grow up and stop trying to play with the big boys!

36 posted on 05/19/2003 8:26:05 AM PDT by David Hunter
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: paltz
Now the the Cold War is over, Russia is our friend.
Now the the Cold War is over, Russia is our friend.
Now the the Cold War is over, Russia is our friend.
Now the the Cold War is over, Russia is our friend.
Now the the Cold War is over, Russia is our friend.
37 posted on 05/19/2003 8:28:41 AM PDT by Mr. Mojo
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Mr. Mojo
LOL...that's now THAT the Cold War is over.
38 posted on 05/19/2003 8:29:05 AM PDT by Mr. Mojo
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 37 | View Replies]

To: Poohbah
Unless the story is on the sidebar, search is not our friend. At least for those just coming into the forum.
39 posted on 05/19/2003 8:31:37 AM PDT by AxelPaulsenJr (Shriner's Childrens Hospitals Provide Free Medical Care to Those In Need.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies]

To: AxelPaulsenJr
How come I never have any problems with the search function?
40 posted on 05/19/2003 8:34:07 AM PDT by Poohbah (Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 39 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-8081-85 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson