<i>The missile, officially called the RS-28 Sarmat (pictured left), has been nicknamed Satan 2 and it serves as a replacement for the RS-36M, which was often called “Satan” by NATO.<p>...<p>The new missile is believed to be mostly an upgrade in electronic systems, with little or no changes to the ICBM’s range or power according to Robert Kelley, a former nuclear weapons expert from the U.S, Dept of Energy. Its important to note, however, that only one of these missiles is powerful enough to destroy huge landmasses – it is estimated that one could destroy an area as large as Texas or France, with each warhead capable of carrying 10 tons of nukes.</i><p>Absolutely ridiculous. If this is an upgrade to the R-36 family that doesn't upgrade the warheads, then we can look at the the 10-warhead variants of R-36 ("RS-36M" must be a typo; there is no such commonly used missile designation): <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_(missile)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_(missile)</a><p>Observe that the R-36 configuration with 10 warheads delivers at most 1 megaton per warhead. That's enough to ruin any nation-state's day, but it falls woefully short of destroying the Texan/French landmass. The widest-ranging immediate effect of large nuclear explosions is burns from radiant energy; for a 1 megaton airburst you can expect third degree burns from radiant energy out to a 12.6 km radius (497 km^2 area). With 10 warheads you can inflict that level of destruction across 4970 km^2, or about 0.7%/0.8% of the total area of Texas/France. No doubt it could kill a much larger fraction of the population in either location, because humans are very concentrated in urban areas, but there's another twist: the R-36M2 Voevoda (SS-18 Mod 5) that this new missile will replace is designed for <i>hard target kills</i>, e.g. attacking underground bunkers or missile silos with surface bursts. That's why the new missile will have accuracy upgrades: it's easy to destroy a city via ICBM even with sloppy guidance, but hardened targets need a relatively close hit to ensure destruction. This hard target attack role means that the lethal-to-humans radius is going to be smaller and that the targets are going to be missile silos out in the middle of nowhere rather than e.g. Houston or San Antonio.<p>You can play with Nukemap here to see the effects: <a href="http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/" rel="nofollow">http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/</a><p>All in all this was an impressively high level of stupid exaggeration for a topic that needs no exaggeration at all to be sobering.