United Press International,
WASHINGTON: Fall is the season around the world when the leaves fall from the trees, but in Russia this year, it has also been the season when intercontinental ballistic missiles designed to overwhelm missile defense systems take their wings and soar into the heavens.
For Russian President Vladimir Putin's long efforts to renovate Russia's still formidable Strategic Rocket Forces are bearing fruit. Within the past two-and-a-half weeks, Russia has conducted no fewer than six successful strategic missile launches.
The tests have been an interesting mixture of old and new. On Sept. 27, the Russian navy successfully carried out an operation that Putin especially appreciated, given his long commitment also to trying to revive the navy: The R-30 submarine-based “Bulava” missile R-30 was successfully launched for the first time.
The other tests were less showy. As analyst Pavel Baev wrote for the Eurasia Daily Monitor of the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation Tuesday, “Five other tests, however, including the Sept. 30 launch from the Georgii Pobedonosets from the Pacific Fleet and the Oct. 7 and 8 launches from Borisoglebsk of the Northern Fleet, involved missiles of old types that have to be tested repeatedly, since technically they are past their expiration date.”
American analysts tend to discount the value of such weapons and such tests, an attitude that in recent years has even infected Russian analysts writing in Moscow. But such confidence, or arrogance, may well be misplaced. Over the past century Russian military, space and missile and technology have repeatedly astonished and confounded the world by getting impressively reliable results from unassuming, simple or supposedly obsolescent technology. One classic example was the old Mir space station, a supposed “death trap” on which not a single Russian cosmonaut or U.S. astronaut ever lost their lives or came close to it, a striking and sobering contrast with the immolation of seven astronauts on the Columbia space shuttle during reentry over Palestine, Texas in February 2003.
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