Russia’s Crashing Cruise Missile

Jeffrey Lewis 0:05

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog, and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:23

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafik Kariri Center for the Middle East.

Jeffrey 0:27

You're back, Aaron.

Aaron 0:29

I am two weeks gone in Turkey. I made it out safely, albeit with a cold. So I may cough a few times during this episode.

Jeffrey 0:38

You know, I think any time you go to Turkey and don't find yourself thrown in prison, it's a good visit.

Aaron 0:44

It was good to be back. You know, it was good to be back in Turkey. I hadn't been there in about a year because of, let's say, some visa issues. And, you know, able to go back and get a taste for it again.

Jeffrey 0:55

Turkey's not the pseudo-democracy that we're talking about this week.

Aaron 0:59

No, it's test a missile, get a pod here at the Arms Control Wonk podcast.

Jeffrey 1:04

Yeah, this is a belated makeup pod to Vladimir Putin, who has been happily testing his nuclear-powered cruise missile. And we've been happily geolocating his exploits. Which has kind of been a fun experience, not merely because we were able to geolocate it, although someone kind of beat us to the punch, which I'm still grumpy about, but it actually ends up being kind of a fun story about the things you learn about their nuclear-powered cruise missile by being able to understand the location and geography of their testing.

Aaron 1:38

Yeah, I mean, I think we should back up because we did a podcast on this. Maybe we'll put down the show notes about how Russia unveiled, quote unquote, new systems. And one of which was the cruise missile that could fly anywhere, anytime, as far as you want. And it was powered by a nuclear reactor.

Jeffrey 1:53

Aaron, that cruise missile can fly anywhere you want as long as it is within 22 miles of the launch site.

Aaron 2:00

Yeah, so I mean, I think we've had two stories. I mean, well, like two plus stories about their testing cycle and how far this thing goes.

Jeffrey 2:12

Yeah, so I mean, for listeners who don't remember the podcast, this is a crazy idea. The fundamental technology, the Russians haven't sort of described it, but... But as best we can tell, it's the old nuclear-powered scramjet. So it really is just a nuclear reactor that powers a jet engine, which the US seriously considered but abandoned because it spews radiation everywhere.

Aaron 2:48

There's safer fuel sources even if you give up some range, right?

Jeffrey 2:53

Yeah. Yeah. So – but the Russians seem to be happily testing this thing. When Vladimir Putin showed it off, he showed a video of a test. And he said that it was being conducted, the tests were being conducted. Well, he didn't say Novaya Zemlya, but he used the Russian name for Novaya Zemlya, which is Russia's nuclear test ground.

And we thought we could go ahead and take those photos and geolocate the launch site and see what that tells us about the program.

Aaron 3:23

So let's just get right into it. I mean, should we talk about the geolocation first or the four tests?

Jeffrey 3:28

Oh, we should have talked about the four tests.

Aaron 3:30

Yeah, let's just start. I mean, let's just pick up on the four tests, because the first thing we saw, I think it was Friend of the Pod, shall I say? Bill Gertz and the Free Beacon had a piece in April 2018.

Jeffrey 3:41

Enemy of the Pod!

Aaron 3:43

Friend of me.

Jeffrey 3:44

He blocks me on Twitter.

Aaron 3:49

Jeffrey's Twitter nemesis, Bill Gertz. No, no, no.

Jeffrey 3:53

I'm his Twitter nemesis. That's how nemeses work. Your nemesis is the person you never defeat. But actually, I mock Bill so mercilessly that he's blocked me on Twitter. So I'm his nemesis.

Aaron 4:06

But nevertheless, he had a first story, I think, in April 2018 that cites two tests, correct?

Jeffrey 4:12

You know, the actual very first person was Lucas Tomlinson. When Putin announced the existence of the program, it shook loose a lot of details. Which, by the way, reporters often know this rule that sometimes when you have half a story, you go ahead and publish it because the publicity will cause the rest of the story to shake out.

As I think we noted in the previous pod, we had heard rumors that there were some crazy Russian defense programs underway. Yeah, definitely. That were crazier than the underwater... Nuclear-armed drone. And so when you and I saw the nuclear-powered cruise missile, we were like, oh, that's what people were talking about. But they were always careful not to actually say anything.

But once the Russians had revealed the program, then you had a series of stories. So I think the first was by Lucas Tomlinson at Fox, who got it confirmed that, yes, the system had been tested, but they had crashed. Yes, that's true. Then Bill Gertz got a story in saying that there had been two tests and it had crashed.

And then I think CNBC has now had a story that said that there were four tests between November and February, all of which crashed and the furthest went 22 miles.

Aaron 5:32

And then the shortest lasted for four seconds and flew for five miles.

Jeffrey 5:36

Yeah, which probably was not a lot of fun for the dudes in bunny suits.

Aaron 5:41

No. No. But go on.

Jeffrey 5:46

And so, you know, we had video and we had timing and Gertz had some interesting other details. For example, he said that a modified Russian transport aircraft used by Rosatom had been sighted nearby. And so we decided to make use of our various resources to see if we could go find the site. And, I mean, it was kind of interesting and challenging.

Aaron 6:15

Yeah, I mean, we were talking about the soft pod, and it was really interesting because of where it is on the globe, the challenges of getting imagery up there for a number of reasons, mostly having to do with climate and how the sun shines on the Earth.

Jeffrey 6:30

Yeah, you know... We actually did a little writeup of this case study, which we'll end up putting up on the Slack channel. But I presented it at one of our meetings in not in Vienna, but in Krems. You'll remember all the little German penises.

Aaron 6:47

Our listeners have not forgotten.

Jeffrey 6:50

Our listeners have not forgotten that one. Yeah. Austrian penises, I guess. I didn't, I didn't interrogate the penises about their particular background. We did a presentation, and it really was to illustrate how challenging it is to use traditional overhead imagery to look at Novaya Zemlya, particularly between November and February when the missile was being tested, because Novaya Zemlya is way the f*** up there.

To give you an example, we actually, last year, as part of a project, we've been monitoring the test site part of the island where the tunnels are. We wanted to buy some imagery. We tasked an Israeli satellite. We paid money to have them actually try to take pictures of this place. And it took months. And every time the satellite would do a pass, we would get a note back saying, nope, totally cloudy.

Nope, totally cloudy. Nope, totally cloudy. And we eventually, on the last week of the period that we had paid for tasking, finally got two passes that were partially clear that you could together stitch To make a coherent scene. Right. And so that's how hard it is to get images. And the damn thing was, you know, black and white.

So one of the kind of things that we were able to do is because we have this partnership with planet you know, their doves are overhead all the time. And so you're getting a picture every day, even if it's not, even if it's cloudy, you know, there were some days when it's not cloudy. And that actually was really, really helpful because we were able to detect once we geolocated and we can talk about how we did it.

We're able to get an image of the preparations. The problem is it's still cloudy most of the time. And because it is so far north, you know, it never really gets light in the winter. So if you go look at like DigitalGlobe's catalog, they never have any pictures between November and February because it never gets more than twilight, which kind of leads to the second thing, which we haven't done yet, but we're now talking.

We have a partnership with Airbus, and I think we're going to get synthetic aperture radar images of the site because synthetic aperture radar can look through the clouds and doesn't need light.

Aaron 9:42

I think the interesting thing, and I didn't attend this sort of famous meeting in Krems, although we did talk about it on the podcast, is that the imagery and the stories were able to come together and therefore it's able to feed your guys' analysis and that one thing builds on top of the other.

Jeffrey 10:02

Yeah, there was a nice detail in one of the Bill Gertz stories. And, you know, Bill Gertz, you got to be careful. But he reported that the aircraft was on site, that there was a Rosatom aircraft that was specially modified to do missile tracking. And, right, because we have a general interest in this island because it's where the nuclear tests happen, we have pins in all of the places used and disused.

And there's really only one proper airfield where an aircraft like that could operate. And sure enough, we got a picture from Planet of the aircraft sitting on the tarmac. And it's, you know, it's a giant aircraft. And so we could, you know, it stood out and we could measure it. And, you know, sure enough, that detail bore out.

And again, like... Most of the pictures Planet had were cloudy, because most of the time it's up there, it is cloudy. And the aircraft was only there You know, for like this really brief period. And, you know, like if you had sort of gone with the traditional, you know, overhead imagery company, you're going to get one shot at catching it.

And if it's cloudy that day or if it's, you know, if the error plane appears in the like gap between passes, you miss it. You know, it's kind of this thing I always say, which is a three meter image on the day you need it is infinitely more valuable than a 30 centimeter image two weeks after it no longer matters.

Aaron 11:34

Should we talk about what this thing is and maybe like how the imagery reinforced that?

Jeffrey 11:39

Well, so I think we should talk about how we found the location. Because that in and of itself is kind of an interesting story, and we can give the Russian guy some credit. Oh, yeah. But then we should talk. The big thing that comes across is the trajectory that they're testing on, and I think that leads us to some conclusions.

Aaron 11:58

So you guys monitor this place because of its linkage to the Russian nuclear weapons program, and therefore you have an interest in the site to begin with, and so you had an idea of where to begin looking once you got some of the details from the stories.

Jeffrey 12:14

Yeah, so, you know, Putin had said it was at Novaya Zemlya. And you could see in the video that it was clearly Novaya Zemlya because it was twilight-y and there was snow on the ground. I mean, okay, that's not 100%, but it looked like Novaya Zemlya. But also, because it is a nuclear-powered cruise missile... You're going to want to put it in a place that if it crashes, you don't care, right?

Yeah. You're not going to test this thing in downtown Moscow. And so we kind of thought about how we would cite a test like that. And we ultimately came to the conclusion that You would want the test to occur someplace where atmospheric nuclear testing had happened. You know, someplace that was like already contaminated and even if it, you know, depending on what the radiation levels are like, the kind of place that would have been selected for contamination because it's far away.

And because we had done a really comprehensive survey of Novaya Zemlya, we knew where all the disused sites were, right? So we knew where like if you were going to put like docks up, Like, where do they already have docks? Where do they already have, you know, buildings that, you know, may or may not be usable? And there's one particular site which looked to us to be disused.

But do you remember when Google Earth used to have the photo layer?

Aaron 13:52

Yeah.

Jeffrey 13:53

Yeah, I do. So someone had taken a picture showing pallets of shit. At Gribavaya Bay. Was this Vadim? No, no, no. It was somebody who went on a tour. And it drove me crazy because, of course, they've now stripped that layer out, right?

Aaron 14:14

Yeah, they have.

Jeffrey 14:15

But I still have the picture. And I remembered where the picture was. And so we looked at two sites, one in the south, but then one in the north. And I remembered that. And sure enough, there is a clump of buildings – Not far I mean it's you wouldn't want to walk it in the winter but basically accessible from where we saw the pallets and the tents and there was a clump of buildings that was a perfect match for the images that the Russians had released and then to my eternal shame we did nothing with it because we were still looking for a ground truth image and this guy on LiveJournal Has an incredible ground truth image.

And so he beats us. And I'm kind of glad I have to say that he beat us because he literally has a ground truth image taken from exactly the same spot that the camera filmed the launch.

Aaron 15:22

Should we say his name to give him some notoriety on the podcast here?

Jeffrey 15:24

Well, I mean, he's E. Maximoff. And we'll put a link to his analysis in the Slack channel. He did a really, really good job. But once that happened and we were now certain of the location, we went and looked at Planet. And then I'm like super happy about this. We actually think we have a picture of the canister with the cruise missile in it sitting there.

Oh, really? I didn't know that. Ready for the test. Yeah, probably from – it's from September, so it's a little early. So it could be just a container, but it's angled in exactly the correct direction.

Aaron 16:09

Yeah, and I think that's where we want to go with this. So if we think back to the original pod, there was quite – it flipped from a video to a computer-generated, I guess – Like a CGI video where we see it crisscrossing the globe. And then we see in the reporting that the longest it goes is 22 miles.

And I think you want to get to the trajectory that they're firing it on and sort of all this stuff coming together and what this thing actually is doing.

Jeffrey 16:38

Well, right, because once you see the buildings, you can basically tell what direction the missile is firing. And we did the same analysis that E. Maximoff did. Because there is a video of it flying, you can match the terrain because you can see the ground. And so you can figure out where it flew. And what was so interesting about the trajectory...

Is they were shooting it at the area where they had done atmospheric tests, including Tsar Bomba, the biggest nuclear test ever.

Aaron 17:16

Oh, I didn't know that. That's where they were shooting it toward.

Jeffrey 17:19

Yeah, so if it... Well, I mean, it makes sense, right? They were aiming it toward a place where it would come down and they could recover it. But the stories that say how far it went... No more than 22 miles, I think those are consistent with the fact that the missile is not working correctly because it's coming down too close to the launch site and in a place where I would not expect them to want to crash it.

And 22 miles puts it in the water.

Aaron 17:54

How far is it? Because it's on an island, just because people aren't looking at it. It's on an island. So how far is it to that test site where you'd want to recover it?

Jeffrey 18:02

It's about a hundred kilometers. So basically it's, you're shooting it from one part of the island to another part, but you're shooting it over the entrance to Matochkin Shar, which is the straight that bisects the island. Gotcha. And so they basically put it into the mouth of that strait.

Aaron 18:24

So that helps you draw at least a hypothesis that it's falling far short of where it's supposed to land and they can recover.

Jeffrey 18:33

Yeah. If it had gotten over the water and then landed in the area where atmospheric testing had been performed, I think we would have looked at that and said that was probably a success.

Aaron 18:48

Right. Even though it didn't fly to full range, at least you got enough data out of that.

Jeffrey 18:52

Right. But in fact, it's 22 miles. It's annoying because if it crashes in the snow and we can get an image, we would have confirmation. We could see the crash in the snow. Because presumably it'll make a mess. But if it goes in the water, which it did, then we don't see anything. So yeah, 22 miles on the trajectory it was on puts it right in the water.

I guess I should do this in kilometers, so that's like 38 kilometers. It needs to go 80 to 100 kilometers to be successful. I guess it could go as little as 60 kilometers, but that's kind of pushing it. If I were them, I'd shoot for like 70, 80 kilometers.

Aaron 19:47

Any thoughts on why it's falling short? I mean, I guess this goes back to what the thing is and maybe the history of these types of nuclear-powered scramjets.

Jeffrey 19:57

Yeah, I don't know. You know, presumably there must have been some ground testing. That's how we did it in the United States. But we never then got to... Flight testing the missile. We never got to flight testing the missile. I think the US ground tests, I think the first one was really quite large, and they were working on making it smaller.

And I'm guessing that to have an operationally sized cruise missile, that's a thing that needs to be tested. That's not something that the US did very easily. I presume it's that. That's kind of a vague answer. I don't really know. I'm just delighted that we can spot the test site. We can actually see either a container or we think maybe the canister on site because it's in exactly the right location.

And we can then trace the trajectory and then make a hypothesis that, yeah, if it's going 22 miles, I don't think they're putting it in the ocean on purpose. I wouldn't. It's going to be a pain to go fish it back out.

Aaron 21:11

That's right. And then, you know, maybe this is where we sort of go on the parenthetical thing that's in the Gert story.

Jeffrey 21:17

Evgeny, get scuba gear.

Aaron 21:20

Bring a wetsuit. I mean, about the radionuclide. Radionuclide. Because there's always this idea that you wouldn't test this thing because it would put off... I guess, you know, radiation, and that this would be able to be detected. And if it's falling into the ocean, maybe that's why this isn't spiking someplace?

Jeffrey 21:42

Yeah, I mean, there have been these curious reports of readings throughout Europe, some of which may correlate to the tests. But, you know, they're not flying very far, so they're not sort of getting up all that far to spew stuff. I'm at the moment, I'm taking those with a grain of salt, because... You know, no offense to the discipline of radiochemistry, but the backgrounds are bad.

And, I mean, there's stuff that puts out radionuclides. Like... You know, like there was a false alarm where people detected fission in Europe. It was maybe 20 years ago now. And it turned out it was a military decontamination exercise that had triggered this stuff. You know, there's medical isotope production. There are reactors that probably vent and don't report it.

There are nuclear submarines. You know, there are different things. And I think our sensors now are so sensitive now. That they pick up all kinds of stuff, and I don't know that we really have characterized the environment all that. All that accurately. So, you know, like there's a lot of interesting radionuclide readings. And I think a lot of them turn out to be false positives or unexpected sources.

And so I think it's a little hard to just go from, hey, there have been some weird radionuclide readings in Europe to they must have come from this test. They could have come from the tests, but we don't have precise days for them. And I am... Whatever respect I have for radiochemistry as a discipline doesn't really carry over to atmospheric transport modeling, which seems really, really, really, really sensitive.

And you can – I think you can torture atmospheric transport models. Well, if you wanted to bring this back – I don't love atmospheric transport modeling. I mean there's a reason that we all joke about weathermen, right? Like – That's going from climate science to like, that's actually meteorology. So it's like, eh.

Aaron 23:58

Well, if you want to bring this thing back full circle, it's like, so like you, you, before we, we, we went on this, it was, you were able to have a good sense of where it was. You were able with difficulty to find it because of the location. And then you were able to, from that, get the trajectory.

And then infer or at least draw a hypothesis that the tests were failing. And now I know that you mentioned at the outset, maybe we'll just close with this, is that you want to get synthetic aperture radar so you can get around some of the challenges with imagery. What would you specifically be looking for?

Jeffrey 24:33

Yeah, I mean, the reason that we gave this presentation in CREMS is because we wanted to make the point that companies like Planet and Airbus are giving us tools that are... Qualitatively different than the existing overhead imagery. And that allows us to do new things. And so I think I've already talked about how great it was to have planets daily coverage.

Synthetic aperture radar is awesome because it doesn't care about clouds and it doesn't care about light. In fact, one of my favorite moments with Lars Who's one of the guys we work with. I say one of the guys. We work with Catherine and Lars. So he is the guy we work with. We were talking about how cloudy some of these locations were.

And he has this hilarious German accent. And he's like, oh, is it cloudy? I have never noticed. Because he stares at radar pictures all day. He's not even aware that there are clouds. Yeah. But what SAR is really good for when it looks through the clouds is it sees when objects have moved, and it can see ground tracks when ground has been disturbed.

One of the latest pictures we have before the light left us for the season, we really couldn't see anything at the site, but we could see that they were keeping the road clear in the snow. Which in Novaya Zemlya is not a trivial task, right? But what SAR can do is it can tell you if the surface of that road has changed.

So you can see vehicles driving around and things like that. So that's a really, really useful thing. Because you could literally be at a point where they put the canister into place... But it's totally cloud covered. And SAR would see that there was an object there where there had not been before. And it would also be able to see where the vehicles drove around.

So if, for example, they fire it and it goes six miles, right, and still lands on the ground, we ought to be able to see them drive out with their vehicles to retrieve it. So, I mean, you know, that's obviously if everything works perfectly in real life. Nothing ever works perfectly. But you can really see that by going past optical, you can do some really cool things.

So, I mean, for us, it's a cool use case because, you know, like... Everybody and their grandmother now buys satellite images and everybody fancies that they're a photo interpreter. And while I don't know that people are all quite as good as they say they are at that, you know, often news outlets don't know the difference. So, you know, there's...

There's some not good OSINT out there, and we're always looking at developing new tricks. And these are some cool new tricks, you know, planets, daily imagery, and Airbus' synthetic aperture radar.

Aaron 27:48

And we should always remember to keep in mind that what we're talking about here is a nuclear-powered cruise missile. Yeah, it's f***ing crazy. It's crazy.

Jeffrey 27:59

I mean, there's a reason they're firing this thing off in the Arctic.

Aaron 28:03

Right, because the thing is crazy. The thing is fantastically absurd. But nevertheless, the trajectory thing is the coolest thing. I mean, kudos. That's really, really awesome. And that hypothesis, I didn't know that. And that actually makes a lot of sense. That makes perfect sense. And so I guess I can go to bed tonight as a little bit happy that they're struggling with it, but they're still struggling with it, which means that they wanted to build a nuclear-armed, nuclear-powered cruise missile.

Jeffrey 28:32

Well, it means they're going to keep testing the damn thing.

Aaron 28:35

That's right. One of these days it may work, you know, and then what?

Jeffrey 28:39

Yeah. So we're going to put all that up on the Slack channel, which leads me to ask Scott, how are things over on the Slack channel?

Other voice 28:49

Everything's going very well on the Slack channel. Thank you for asking, Jeffrey. And if you would like to support the podcast and our continuing research, you can head over to patreon.com slash ACW podcast. And for $5 a month or $3 a month, if you are a student, you can support us and gain access to the Slack channel.

Again, that link is patreon.com slash ACW podcast.

Jeffrey 29:14

It is an excellent way to network and build your skill set. Hey, Aaron. Yes. Thanks for joining me. It's good to be back. And thank you for listening.