BMD Focus: Bulava breakthrough -- Part 1

WASHINGTON, July 12 (UPI) -- Russia's Bulava ICBM took wings and flew straight and true last month. The event was little noted in the U.S. media, but it could herald a profound shift in the global balance of power.

The Bulava is the next generation of Russian submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles and is a variant of the land-based, mobile Topol-M ICBM. It is meant to be the main strategic weapon of Russia's 12 new Borei 955-class strategic submarines. But as we have previously reported in these columns, it has been plagued by apparently endless test failures and development problems.

However, soaring global oil prices came to the Bulava's rescue. Russian President Vladimir Putin was able to use the huge of flow of hard currency into Russia's treasury from oil and gas exports to pour resources into the Bulava development program and on June 28 the investment finally paid off. The nuclear strike submarine Dmitry Donskoy successfully test-fired a Bulava from the depths of the White Sea to a target in the Kura range in Kamchatka.

The Bulava's development has been star-crossed. It got off to a strong start with three successful test launches in a row. It was not some radical new design with untested technology but a mature adaptation of the already tried and tested Topol-M.

But last year everything suddenly seemed to go wrong for the Bulava. Three more test launches in a row were failures in a brief four-month period. The unsuccessful tests took place on Sept. 7, Oct. 25 and Dec. 24, 2006.

According to Russian press reports, the first missile failed to reach its target and the second self-destructed after deviating from its trajectory. Anatoly Perminov, head of the Russia's Federal Space Agency publicly admitted that in the third test, the Bulava's third stage malfunctioned.

"These three test failures, and only three successes, are worrisome. So the test program has been temporarily suspended," analyst James Dunnigan wrote on StrategyPage.com on Nov. 12, 2006.

Putin took the unusual step of publicly hailing the June 28 test. it also gave him a power boost right before his most recent summit with U.S. President George W. Bush at Keenebunkport, Maine.

However, the June 28 test success is only the new beginning of a long road for the Bulava. The Moscow newspaper Kommersant on Dec. 27, 2006, quoted Perminov as saying that Bulava would require 12 to 14 successful test launches before it could be deployed as the next generation of the sea-based leg of Russia's nuclear triad.

"Given that Bulava blasts off two or three times a year, Russia's armed forces will hardly get it sooner than two or three years," Kommersant said.

But with less than a year to go before he has said he will step down as president in accord with the two-term limits of the Yeltsin Constitution next year, the successful Bulava test gives Putin the assurance that his efforts to rebuild Russia's formidable strategic nuclear forces into a state-of-the-art arsenal for the coming decades are back on course.

Since taking office on Jan. 1, 2000, Putin has repeatedly emphasized his commitment to modernizing the nuclear firepower of the Russian navy, and he would certainly have wanted to see the Bulava operationally deployed on the new Borey-class submarines before leaving office.

"The R-30 Bulava, or SS-NX-30, intercontinental ballistic missile is a version of the land-based Topol-M ICBM that is cut down in length in order to fit into a submarine missile firing tube. This cuts back the amount of solid fuel propellant it can carry and reduces its range to a still formidable 4,800 miles. .... Each Bulava can carry up to 10 independently launched re-entry vehicles or MIRVs that could strike different targets, so a single Borey class submarine would have the capability to annihilate up to 120 American or European cities," Kommersant said in its Dec. 27 report.

In fact, Stratfor.com noted after the June 28 test while the first Borey class submarine Yuri Dolgoruky is designed to carry 12 MIRV-ed Bulkavas, the rest are designed to carry 16 each. That would give each one of them the capability to destroy up to 192 cities.

--

Next: Lessons from the Bulava