compared to the grand ole USA?

Finland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia about how compassionate dear Russia is to civilians.

For Holodomor alone, anywhere from between 2.4 and 7.5 million. For Stalin's Purges, anywhere from between 650,000 and 1.2 million. For Katyn, 22,000. For the March deportations, at least 94,000. About 3,000 killed in Hungary in 1956. Nearly 35,000 killed during the Battle of Grozny. Anywhere from 850,000 to 1.5 million civilians in Afghanistan.

For comparison, the Iraq War, which you seem to think killed every living human being on the face of the planet, is estimated between 110,000 and 650,000 civilian deaths; at the most liberal estimate, that's fewer than the most conservative estimate for how many of its own civilians Russia killed during the Purge.

For even more context, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan killed at least twice as many civilians as the US invasion of Afghanistan and invasion of Iraq combined.

easier for you, how about since the year 2000 when your "Doctor fucking Doom" first became President of Russia.

I'm just going to go ahead and lump him in with his Soviet predecessors where he wants to be.

He's even picking up where they left off, with propping up a puppet regime by bombing Muslim insurgents.

Wouldn't it be relevant, necessary even, to implicitly allow not merely civilian deaths but also square mileage due to the mechanism of expansionism and number of nation-states dissolved as well to better gauge a government's greed?

Or are the repugnant, offensive and destructive actions of any one nation wholly predicated on a comparison to Washington rather than taken, analyzed and judged on its own lack of merit?

We're talking about a stealth nuclear missle developed by Russia. Civilian casualties aren't relevent to the story. That said, I assume we've killed more between Iraq and Afghanistan, though the Russian number is well over 100,000.

so what does that make us?

Full steam ahead would be war production during the 40's (41% of GDP) as opposed to the here and now (4.75% of GDP).

"so what does that make us?"
Individuals who are rational enough to judge the actions of one nation on its own merits rather than wholly predicating them on Washington's merits.

Okay, the article says the size of France or Texas, but I still feel some details are lacking.

Half a dozen of those could pretty much wipe out most life on the planet. It's also not clear just how much radioactivity would be released, or what it's half life will be.

Details, people, it's all in the details.

That seems unlikely:

In total nuclear test megatonnage, from 1945–92, 520 atmospheric nuclear explosions (including 8 underwater) have been conducted with a total yield of 545 megatons, with a peak occurring in 1961-62, when 340 megatons were detonated in the atmosphere by the United States and Soviet Union.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_testing

No finer use for public monies! And what could possibly go wrong!?

Texas or France. Two or three of those in Europe would destroy most of Western Europe. Africa and Asia are larger, so you're right that I've underestimated how many would be needed to wipe out most life. Not to mention North and South America.

Still, if I were an alien race wanting to clear this planet of the creatures that currently live here, I'd be quite happy with this development.

Destruction over that area is on par with an asteroid impact, and multiple times the size of e biggest nuke to date, the 1961 Tsar Bomba. Russia's big, but just how big a chunk of it is Vlad willing to flatten (and poison) to test it?

That's what I was trying to get at, but I was far too oblique.

I am hesitate to say I simply don't believe the claim, since I know next to nothing about bombs or how they're built or just how destructive they can be, but it does seem rather improbable.

...so the main question is how does it compare to stuff we've had for 30 years.

Not anything you'd want launched, but it doesn't really change the strategic situation.

the largest of which was 50 megatons. Those could wipe out an area the size of Massachusetts. These NATO codename Satan 2s have 12 warheads that are about a megaton each, but much more accurate and likely to reach their targets than bomber-carried weapons of the Cold War.

But some internet digging revealed, but unable to verify:

12 warheads per missile, average yield 1 to 1.4 Mtons each. Each warhead independently target-able.

I only know this from having taken a poli. sci. class on the Cold War in college but for strategic reasons MIRVed warheads are redundantly-targeted (12 warheads means 6 primary targets and 3 secondary targets...if a primary target is sensed as destroyed, the IRV "corrects" to a secondary target) and time from deployment to impact limits the number of reassignments possible post-launch to one per IRV. 12 warheads means a maximum of 9 and a near-certainty of 6 detonations. (This is up from the earliest US and Soviet MIRVs which carried 4 warheads with a maximum of 2 detonations.) To limit the risk of "broken arrows" (loose viable nuclear weapons) warheads not detonated on target self-destruct.

It's still pretty horrific...but it's not quite as bad as 12 warheads initially sounds.

See?

--imm

[img][/img]

Could wipe out NYC or LA - but not the entire US.

yup

No MX missiles exist anymore and haven't since 2005.

It figures a relic from the Cold War like Putin would deploy a new strategic nuclear missile system.

Not sure I believe any of this anymore.

How many people has Russia killed in Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria, compared to the US in Afghanistan and Iraq?

than the US did in Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

Dollars to Donuts it's a planted story from Lockheed-Martin to ensure we develop stealthier stealth weapons.

Donald Trump will build it. It will be the stealthiest!

The Empire must now have a Death Star. Why settle for vaporizing one puny little nation. Let's build something that would destroy a planet.

OK, maybe I've had one too many Bombay Safire's and water.

On edit, here is the link to Russian state media's report that prompted the article the OP talks about:
http://sputniknews.com/russia/20160508/1039258053/russia-ballistic-missile-sarmat.html

Russia's New ICBM Sarmat Can Penetrate Defense Shield, Wipe Out Texas

The best current missile defenses system may prove powerless against Sarmat, Russia's new intercontinental ballistic missile, which will be ready for field trials this summer, according to the Russian news network Zvezda.
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The broadcaster added that the RS-28 is capable of wiping out parts of the earth the size of Texas or France, and that its higher speed performance will enable it to speed past every missile defense system in existence.
Although there is very little information on the technical characteristics of the new missile, some sources said that the Sarmat is a two-stage missile with an estimated operational range of 10,000km and a mass of at least 100 tons, including a payload weighing from 4 tons up to 10 tons.
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Article doesn't say.....

Just WTF, humans? WHY?

Blast radius approximately 450 miles or so, knowing the size of Texas. Details please.

Doomsday weapon articles come out of the woodwork........Between this and the North Korea articles, the MIC is ready for it's yearly blank check.......

They just needed to wait for us to eventually kill ourselves off lol. Nukes that can wipe out small countries. What a practical and necessary invention and use of human time and intelligence.

It was an unmanned supersonic bomber that could remain airborne for weeks, unmanned because the radiation from its engine would be deadly to humans, even humans it flew over. After dropping its load of atomic bombs it would fly around a few more weeks terrifying an enemy nation's inhabitants with its deadly radiation and smashing them with sonic booms. Then it would crash into a final target leaving a radioactive Chernobyl scale mess.

Facilities to test the scheme were built at Jackass Flats in Nevada, including a prototype engine:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto

Disease used to be the big killer. Now we have super bombs.

The only way a nuclear weapon would be a game-changer in terms of the (admittedly fucked up) reasoning which has underlain the uneasy truce between the nuclear superpowers all these years, would be if one country could somehow knock the other country's nuclear strike capability out entirely, to the point that the other country couldn't hit back. (The environmental impact would be global, of course, but that's another story)

Even with a "stealth doomsday missile"- or a bunch, lets follow the logic, here- even if Putin up and decided one day to incinerate the continental United States, we have a 3 pronged nuclear deterrence (as do they) strategy which is implicitly designed to avoid being able to be neutralized in a first strike scenario. That includes not just hardened missile silos, but also strategic bombers and nuclear subs, all of which are ostensibly ready in just such a dreadful scenario.

I don't know if we keep the bombers in the air 24-7 the way we used to, but the subs are still out there- both ours and theirs - so in reality, it's pretty unlikely any kind of stealth doomsday missile would be able to keep us from striking back if attacked.

Which makes the exercise of nuclear war pretty pointless, to recall the movie where Matthew Broderick is the pale computer nerd kid.

And raise you two missiles."

at how russian media sources suddenly become credible to suit a narrative.

We'll wait.