Russia flexes mammoth muscles second day in a row

On 27 September, National Strategic Forces conducted a successful launch of the Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile. Test proved to be success. The missile blasted off from the Plesetsk cosmodrome based in Arkhangelsk oblast’ and hit a dummy target on one of Kamchatka’s polygons.
This was the second launch of the missile of the kind in the past two days. On September 26, Russia launched silo-based Topol against another dummy target in Kamchatka.
The main purpose of two consecutive missile launches was named to be a “performance check”. RVSN (Rossiyskie Voiska Strategicheskogo Naznacheniya – National Strategic Forces) official spokesman, colonel Il’shat Baichurin, mentioned that the success became possible thanks to 3 years of ongoing co-operation effort between the RVSN and the Moscow State Infra-Red Technology Institute.
The new missile entered active duty in 1997 and since then earned a reputation of being the best ballistic missile in the world because of its capability to obey any potential missile defence system and also most unique ability to remain undetected by enemy satellite at the early stages of the launch. Every single missile rolling out of the Votynskiy Production Plant is being tracked by USA representatives. USA also was granted top secret files identifying exact location of all potential missile hangars and silos as a part of co-operation on nuclear stability between two sides.

Copyright NTV

I was able to obtain pictures of two launches on September 26. These were donated by RVSN media service through the Главное daily newspaper. Here they are (click to enlarge):

www.stas.net/5/hiandrei/ballistic/topol/topol-m01.jpg[/html_a]


You may encounter some difficulties accessing the pictures, because the server where I have them is slow and bad. Sorry:)


[Редактировалось Dron (01-10-2000 в 05:58).]