Implications

What does Russian suspension of START mean, in practice?

The basic assumption is that both sides are out of compliance with its provisions for quite a while now, since the inspections have been defunct for, I don’t know how long, but I would say years. Suspending it means acceptance of the new reality, which, in Russian case, probably means that all strategic nuclear submarines have a full complement of warheads (Bulava has 6-10 MIRV warheads per rocket, which means that my expectation is that they are all fully armed now, when there are no considerations of the upper limits on deployed weapons. By default, they were armed with 6 warheads, accuracy in the circle of 350m. Every Borei submarine is armed with 16 Bulava missiles, which means a (theoretical until confirmation) complement of 160 warheads per submarine, from the previous default of 96. There are 6 active Borei submarines in service, and an additional one recently launched. This means 960 nuclear warheads, realistically 1120, and that’s not counting the one remaining Typhoon submarine, Dimitry Donskoy. In addition to that, there are the old Delta IV strategic submarines, carrying Sineva rockets, circle of accuracy 250-500m. One would be tempted to dismiss those as “obsolete”, but have in mind that they are as old as the American Ohio class submarine fleet, and since they work just fine, the Americans are forced to treat them seriously and dedicate sufficient resources to tracking them. Each carries 16 missiles with 4-10 warheads each, which means that the START restrictions would have them limited to 4 warheads per missile, and the Russians can now fully arm them, to the full complement of 160 warheads per submarine, from the default of 64. Let’s say there are 6 active submarines, which means 960 warheads, from previous 384.

As for the ground-based missiles, the Yars carrier (circle of accuracy 150-200m) is armed with “3-6” warheads, but realistically it’s probably 10, and the lower number implies the START restrictions. There were more than 150 (mobile and stationary) launchers as of November 2019, with the number growing by approximately 20 per year, the total expected number being around 200. This means that the maximum armament of the deployed Yars systems is 2000 warheads, but realistically, the number of rockets is likely around 150 and the number of warheads is closer to 1200. The yield of the warhead is variable, between 100-300kT.

In addition to this, there are 60 older silo-based and 18 mobile RT-2PM2 Topol-M as of March 2020. They carry a single warhead around 1MT (circle of accuracy 200m). Topol-M is being routinely replaced with Yars carriers as they age out of service. Also, there are the old Voevoda missiles from the 1980s, that used to be manufactured in Ukraine and are considered obsolete or nearly so, and are being quickly replaced with Yars and Sarmat designs. As of January 2020, the Strategic Missile Troops had 46 R-36M2s in active service. They used to carry around 10 warheads per missile, 500-800kT per warhead, and potentially a large number of decoys.

The Sarmat rocket is basically new and improved version of Voevoda, of fully Russian design, and with greater payload, designed to carry either large single warheads, MIRV cluster of 10, or multiple (likely 16) Avangard hypersonic reentry vehicles, and many decoys. There were several delays in production but around 50 should be deployed by now, or soon enough. Their circle of accuracy is 10m. Since they are in the early phase of adoption, almost nothing is known about their number and armament, but I would expect them to routinely replace the Voevoda missiles, and the total payload of this complement is expected not to vary greatly – 46 missiles, 10 warheads each, 460 in total.

In addition to this, there are the tactical nuclear weapons – torpedoes, cruise missiles and bombs – and without START restrictions, and in light of the recent news about Russian ships being issued nuclear warheads, I would expect that every newly armed naval unit of significance is issued nuclear weapons. I would also expect nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to be available as armament for the strategic bomber fleet, and one must expect nuclear weapons to be flown routinely.

The total number of Russian strategic launchers would thus be estimated around 448 launch vehicles, most of which are MIRVed and carry a complement of 6-10 warheads – 2688 warheads at the minimum. The total number of tactical warheads that can be mounted on either the cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, torpedoes and similar devices is much greater, but their utility is questionable since it would be expected that only a few of those would be launched before the need arises for the strategic ones.

As for the Americans, each of their bombers should be suspected of carrying a payload of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. The same applies for their heavy drones. Each of their stealthy airplanes or heavy drones that approaches Russian borders should be suspected of attempting a clandestine decapitation strike.