Russia Is Building ‘Doomsday Torpedo’ ????

[rudemarine]

Leaked Pentagon Document Suggests Russia Is Building ‘Doomsday Torpedo’ To Hit Coastal Cities

CBS Local — The Russian government is reportedly developing a city-killing torpedo, called Kanyon, that would allegedly leave a country’s coastline uninhabitable for decades.

The “doomsday torpedo” has been on the U.S. military’s radar for several years and was first revealed publicly by the Washington Free Beacon in 2015. Kanyon, an autonomous underwater vehicle carrying a lethal 100-megaton thermonuclear weapon, is reportedly being designed by the Russians to attack coastal areas, major cities, naval bases, and other sea ports.

Russia’s alleged use of the radioactive isotope Cobalt-60 is to blame for the long recovery time.

http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2018/01/22/ ... -pentagon/

Does anyone believe for a second Putin is insane enough to use such a weapon? The U.S. abandoned the Colbalt, "salted" nuke idea during the 60s before they were ever dumb enough to try it, it would poison the land forever and made no sense to anyone. Lastly, 100 megatons? They scared the crap out of themselves and the rest of the world with the 50 megaton test. The pilots who dropped it likely died early due to a massive amount of rads. They barely made it out of the blast at that.

The scary part is with their hyper torpedo technology they could in theory build a large torpedo to attack harbors from many miles away and blow it to bits as well as the cities there. If it could rocket out of the water in the final stage to an altitude of a half mile or so it would be devastating and be the end all to avoiding our missile defense system.

More than likely just fear porn from our own government.

[Upshot]

Old news. Hard to say if there's anything to it, other than the usual russian paper 'wonder' weapons.
This thing goes back to the mid 1950's, before they'd reduced the size of nukes sufficiently to allow missile delivery. The T-15 was schemed as a 22 meter, 40 tonne thermonuclear weapon for the P627 NOVEMBER I attack subs. The single torpedo occupied the front third of the boat, leaving only room for a pair of 533 mm standard tubes and no reloads. The T-15 was also powered by a direct-cycle nuclear 'steam-jet'. The whole thing was very dirty, and really only useful as a coastal city buster. The T-15 came back in the 1960's as a vehicle to deliver the 100 MT Tsar bomba. Proposed by Dr. Peacenik, Sakharov, the weapon horrified the commander of submarine forces as it was designed solely to kill lots of civilians - probably the last russian flag officer to think that.
Dunno. It seems like propaganda, and the drawing circulated in russian briefings were of the old T-15. It would require a dedicated submarine designed around the weapon, which seems like a hell of a stretch for the russians, who are having a hell of a time even getting a SSBN started 20 years ago into service, and haven't built a warship bigger than a Kirvak derived corvette. It's also a big investment for a weapon of limited utility that's a very big, noisy, slow target that can be defeated by extant ASW weapons. The only advantage I can see would be as a plausible-deniable covert first strike weapon. That makes no sense. The deniability is gone the moment the fallout is fingerprinted, and why sneak around when starting WWIII? Speed, shock, surprise. This has none of those attributes.
I'd put it into the category of 'propaganda vapourwear'.

[entropolis]

Upshot: Wholeheartedly agree with most of your points. However, what I find odd is this leaking back into force-posture after...what? Five decades or so of it gathering dust in document graveyards? It seemed a incongruous non-sequitur, a odd jitter in the data of tactical force posture projection. It's like finding plans to throw the Phantom II's back on the production line alongside the F-35's. It was just...plain...weird. The kind of weirdness that any analyst worth their salt can't leave alone once they spot the unaccountable data flutters. After a bit of digging, it appears from where I sit that highest likelihood comes back to Valery Gerasimov making a subtle homage to Marshal Igor Sergeev, and a bit of a "kick the cage of canaries" joke at the wests expense. It's there just to provoke response and paranoia in ignorant civilians(and elected officials!).
I agree with you that such a item would be costly to re-boot and force modernize, and of limited effectiveness. The single greatest strike against it likely existing really comes down to physics, and computation power in my estimation. You'd want such a drone to be code-recallable, and at those depths you'd have to use low-band long wave transmissions. Ergo, anything recallable at that depth would have to have short command code strings.
As an odd coincidence, did you know what's another term we often associate with overly foreshortened cryptography??

...Laughably Hackable!