Russia will soon deploy a total of four nuclear submarines capable of carrying the Poseidon super torpedoes, Russian news portal TopWar.ru reported on Monday, citing defense ministry sources.
The first two ships will enter service with Russia’s Pacific fleet in late 2024 or early 2025 at the latest and will be stationed at Kamchatka. Often referred to as naval drones, the Poseidons are designed for preemptive strike detection and are capable of firing nuclear warheads of up to 100 megatons, reportedly undetected.
The first submarine, Belgorod, is currently undergoing sea trials with the country’s northern fleet, but a nuclear torpedo delivery kit has already been delivered. This phase is now essentially complete for the second submarine, the Khabarovsk, which will enter service with the Russian Navy this year and will receive two more special-purpose submarines by 2027.
Reporting on the news, the Russian newspaper Pravda noted that the basic concept of the Poseidon was inspired by the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, the dissident rights activist Andrei Sakharov. “If anyone asks why Russia is only building four submarines, the answer is simple: The end of the world doesn’t need more,” it stated.
The snide remark shows Moscow’s self-confidence, which stems from the common perception that the U.S. missile surveillance system is unable to detect Poseidon missiles fired from nuclear submarines, which can travel unhindered towards their targets at an extremely fast 185 kilometers per hour in the water. The fact that Russia has gained a head start over the United States in this area was recently acknowledged by Michael Peterson, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, in an interview with Newsweek, when he warned that “Russia is above all other countries in terms of the strength of its submarine fleet.”
In 2022, Russian television propaganda bragged that a single Poseidon torpedo could “plunge Britain into the depths of the sea.”
