Sounds more like some sort of psyops. A test wouldn’t be conducted in a war zone and arming it with concrete instead of explosives is just stupid.
That seems likely to me. “That could have been a real warhead. Now, will you stop resisting?”
I wouldn’t assume it’s trivial to replace one kind of explosive warhead with another. You don’t just pack in some mass of explosives and let it go boom on impact. It’s also worth noting that during the Falklands campaign (and the attack on USS Stark a few years later) some of the worst damage to shipping caused by cruise missiles in the conflict involved not their warheads, but their unspent fuel causing fires that got out of control.
Interesting. The Russians are devolving to…
So this is probably exactly what the Russians are doing. Every aspect of this war has been stupid, right from the first initial stupidity in the invasion.
One would (fervently) hope the Russian military has tighter controls on nuclear warheads than, say, truck batteries.
I remember Denys commented the massive missile attacks have multiple purposes. Infrastructure destruction is obvious.
Russia is also trying to exhaust Ukraine’s limited supply of SAMS and air defense missiles.
The discovery of wreckage from dummy, unarmed missiles confirms that strategy. Throw everyrhing into the sky and let Ukraine blast away their inventory.
Russia wants to control the skies over Ukraine and replicate bombing tactics used in Syria. That can be achieved if Ukraine’s missile supplies run low.
No so much. Look, Ukraine and the Western World more or less let Putin get away with taking Crimea. Just like the West allowed Hitler to take Czechoslovakia. That emboldened Hitler to try for Poland. Crimea emboldened Putin to go for the eastern bit of Ukraine.
But … once you see it has failed, stopping worked better than doubling down.
Ukraine was mad as hornets but little they could do back in 2014. In the interim, they picked up on western training methods (Sgts. as leaders) and tactics. Also US/western Europe punted on Georgia when Russia instigated a takeover of two provinces. And their little enclave in Moldova. No wonder Putin continued moving.
Flying things have to have their mass carefully balanced in order to fly properly. Simply removing a chunk of stuff (like a nuclear warhead) would leave it unbalanced and flying badly, if not immediately crashing.
The stuff removed - uranium and trans-uranium elements - are some of the heaviest/densest stuff around. Heavier than lead. I don’t know the density of most high explosives, but if they were dense enough then they wouldn’t work to balance the missile and concrete might have been the cheapest effective choice around.
Or the Russians are being stupid.
On a side note, the war in Ukraine has led to renewed interest in being able to maintain weapons and munitions stocks through an extended high-intensity conflict:
Why France Is Preparing for a Large Scale War
Yes , this was Putin’s logic, and it made sense, based on all the historical facts at the time.
Yes , it is still very, very possible that Russia will win this war.
It’s fun to mock the incompetent and corrupt Russian army.But they are successfully bombing Ukraine back to the stone age, and haven’t even used their huge air force yet.
Even if Ukraine tries to “negotiate”–i.e. surrender , Russia will probably demand total control of all Ukraine, not just the 4 oblasts they currently have. And then they will continue the scorched earth tactics till the population flees and the ethnic cleansing is complete.
I am sad today.
What does this mean?
Excellent reference to ALL the surface-to-air systems in Ukraine now. Pictures and description. Best for weapon nerds.
The Belarusian foreign minister died suddenly earlier today, two days before a scheduled meeting with Russia’s foreign minister.
Fat Man produced a 21Kt blast over Nagasaki with 6Kg of plutonium. The bomb itself weighed four and a half tons, but most of that was the conventional explosives and blast shell needed to set off the nuclear core – the high density actinides were a pretty tiny fraction of the bomb.
Fell out a window? Tripped and fell on some polonium-210?
Fat Man weighed 10,300 lbs and produced a 21kt yield. A modern W88 warhead weights 400-800 lbs and yields 475 kt. The core of the bomb is maybe a greater part of the modern weight.
If Russia hasn’t used their air force, then how have they lost all these planes? Spontaneous combustion on the runways?
They are using their air force in combat, it’s just that they use them sparingly and at low altitudes. There are plenty of videos of them getting shot down.