Russian rocket scientists created the new Oreshnik intermediate-range ground-based hypersonic ballistic missile from scratch, five years after the US unilaterally terminated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty restricting such weapons, Sputnik asserted in a report yesterday.
“We have a very large scientific and technical reserve for the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, with the Yars ICBM for example. In principle, achieving a similar result with the Oreshnik with such a reserve is possible in fairly short order. The Oreshnik, I think, is a creative evolution of ideas embedded in the Yars,” retired Russian Air Defense Forces colonel and missile expert Mikhail Khodarenok explained in an interview.
“That is, it’s not a smaller version of the Yars, or a Yars missing one stage, but the development of the scientific and technical reserve, those technologies which our design bureaus and industry have today,” Khodarenok explained.
Intermediate-range ballistic missiles like the Oreshnik “are in great demand” today, Khodarenok emphasized, particularly for a transcontinental power like Russia, amid US plans to deploy new ground-based missiles in Europe and Asia. “For the US, possessing this class of weapons is not a matter of life and death, since they’re separated [from their main adversaries] by oceans,” the retired officer said.
Russia is “traditionally strong” when it comes to the creation of new strategic missiles, Khodarenok said, “because whereas the enemy at one time focused on the creation of strategic aviation and naval weaponry, one of the strong points of our design bureaus and the defense complex was always strategic ballistic missiles.”
