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BIG EXCURSION TO HOMELAND ARSENALS
Independent Military Review. October 27, 2006. By Victor Alekseev
This massive volume continues the well-known Encyclopedia of Russia's arms and
technologies. Now it is time to move from firing things to munitions.
The book will be useful not only for so-called consumers of munitions industry,
but also for many other people. Let us say, for journalists and politicians
who often talk about chemical weapons but do not know how do they look like.
Russian (more precisely, Soviet) chemical weapons are also covered in the book.
The list of chemical agents has been approved by the law, all kinds of chemical
munitions have been catalogued in the agreement on destruction of chemical weapons,
these weapons have been unclassified. The book contains sectional views of chemical
missile warheads, rounds, and aerial bombs. Characteristic tables follow the
drawings. It can be seen immediately how much chemical agent the item of ordnance
can contain. So nobody can write now that a village in Chechnya was bombarded
with mustard mines. Because such mines do not exist. And all 622.3 tons of mustard
have been utilized.
The same about so-called "off-center slug bullets" - the legend about these
bullets travels from one publication to another for many years. There are cartridges
with enhanced penetrating action bullets, hard-core bullets, night tracer bullets,
dummy bullets, retarded bullets, armor-piercing/incendiary bullets... There
are even duplex rounds for aerial guns and special underwater cartridges. But
there are no "off-center" bullets in the nature and in production. Sorry.
The 12th volume describes the high-accuracy aerial cruise missile Kh-555 which
was tested by the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin who flew
in a Tu-160 as a co-pilot. The book contains a photo of the missile in a strategic
bomber's compartment. But its characteristics were described in short. Practically,
its range which is of 3500 km, and the conventional warhead mass which is of
350 kg. The book covers a wide range of missiles: anti-radar, anti-tank, anti-ship,
and anti-submarine missiles. As well as air-to-air missiles for combating various
air threats.
A civil reader, believing that the aerial bomb is a black spiky cylinder with
winglets, would be quite astonished coming to the chapter about guided aerial
bombs. Actually, it is also a missile with glass windows in front covering a
homing device. It has vanes on all sides and a jet propulsion system inside.
At the beginning, an untutored person would be astonished at the abundance
of various projectiles. Then he will make many interesting discoveries. Among
naval ordnance, for example, he will find a 300-mm rocket assisted projectile
used with the Udav-1M system to deflect an attacking acoustic torpedo from a
ship by creating a hydro-acoustic decoy.
On the other hand, such an abundance can maze. Looking at this huge munitions
list, it is difficult to imagine how to store and transport all items, and how
to deliver proper projectiles to proper places. Practically, any weapons model
uses a separate set of various-purpose projectiles. For example, the grenade
launchers RPG-7, RPG-16 and SPG-9M need different rounds.
Last designs include munitions for active protection systems. The system "Arena-E"
is described in the book. A scheme shows how the system operates: the radar
station detects an enemy's projectile (missile), a reactive protection element
fires, it explodes and destroys the approaching missile by the stream of fragments.
Obviously, the guided artillery projectiles "Krasnopol" and "Kitolov" take
the place of honor in the volume. They are still considered as a pinnacle of
Russian advanced technologies. It seems that design of new ordnances stopped
in 1970-1980. While we are in the XXI century now. However, new designs are
not covered by the Encyclopedia.
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