Impact turns + answers – bfhmrs russia War Good

AT: ! Poseidon Torpedo

Poseidon’s already being deployed – this is just our impact

Mr. Putin did not criticize President Trump, instead suggesting, as he has in the past, that a secretive “deep state” hobbled the American president. In his speech last year Mr. Putin cataloged an array of new weapons that he said Russia was developing, while animations showed missiles striking the United States. This year he mentioned just a few. This spring, he said, Russia will launch its first nuclear submarine carrying a Poseidon, an unmanned underwater nuclear drone, and will deploy a new Zircon hypersonic missile for the Russian Navy. The missile can fly at nine times the speed of sound with a range of 620 miles, he said. Mr. Putin took up his usual foreign policy cudgel at the end, using most of the 90-minute speech to Russian lawmakers to focus on improving the standard of living in Russia.

No Impact – inefficient, slow, and detectable which leaves it prone to conventional checks.

How useful such a weapon would be is debatable. Poseidon is too slow, compared to ICBMs and bombers, to be useful in a first strike or an immediate retaliatory strike. Moving at high speeds may make it so noisy that anti-submarine can detect it, and its autonomous nature brings up all the questions about armed robots (especially ones carrying mega-bombs). Nonetheless, as a psychological weapon, it's brilliant. There is something frightening, like a Hollywood monster movie, about the thought of a robot tsunami-bomb creeping along the sea floor. But for every vampire, there is a stake waiting to slay it through the heart. H I Sutton, a naval analyst who runs the Covert Shores blog on naval affairs, offers some ideas on technology that NATO can employ to halt Poseidon. Sutton assumes that Poseidon's "operating modes and route planning will likely be simple (read reliable) and relatively direct, relying on speed and depth for survival." That being the case, one countermeasure would be to seed the seabed with networks of sensor-mines to detect and destroy Poseidons. "Ideally the sensor networks would include their own effectors (e.g. torpedo armed mines) to minimize the delay from detection to neutralization, since the targets will be moving much faster than traditional submarine targets," Sutton writes. Sutton also wonders whether Poseidons could be killed by long-range hypersonic glide vehicles launched by U.S. Navy submarines. "The payload could be next-generation lightweight torpedo or nuclear depth charge similar to the retired Subroc [rocket-launched anti-submarine torpedo] weapon," he writes. "The short flight time and long range of this type of system would allow kills far outside realistic ranges for torpedoes and allow submarines operating in the North Atlantic to react to Poseidon launches detected in the Arctic region, hitting the target while it is still reasonably near to the sensor which detected it."