Russia’s most mysterious super weapon has been specifically named by the West, and they are feeling quite confused while studying its capabilities.
According to recent reports by Newsweek journalist Brendan Cole, the Russian Military is developing a mysterious super-weapon and it has became the subject of heated discussions in the west.
In 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin introduced some of the country’s newest generation of superweapons to the international community, including the 3M22 Zircon (Tsirkon) hypersonic, scramjet powered maneuvering anti-ship and land-attack hypersonic cruise missile.
According to Journalist Brendan Cole, the Russian Military recently completed one more test of the Zircon Hypersonic Missile and the Russian Navy expects that the missile will enter into active service by the end of 2022. Now different types of controversies have begun to arise in the West about the capabilities of this new weapon.
“This recent test of Russia’s Zircon Cruise Missile has made the west wondering, is Moscow’s announcement that hypersonic weapons will be deployed by the end of 2022 is really a big threat or not?” Newsweek added.
The West is mainly concerned about whether the Zircon Hypersonic Missiles will have a impact on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict or not? Many analysts believe that the new weapon will have limits in relation to the ongoing war in Ukraine.
In fact, the main role of the Zircon is primarily of an anti-ship cruise missile that is developed to effectively deter the United States Navy and other NATO countries in the Black Sea.
However, another opinion has also emerged, Russia has used some of its anti-ship missiles like the KH-22 and KH-32 to destroy land targets in Ukraine, such as bridges and ammunition depots which has stored western supplied weapons to Ukraine.
Therefore, the 3M22 Zircon Hypersonic Missile can be deployed with the Russian Navy as early as possible in this year to deliver precise, devastating and extremely high-speed attacks in Ukraine that the enemy cannot stop.
It should be known that, since January 2020, Russia has conducted several tests of the 3M22 Zircon Missile, this missile is capable of striking targets deep inside the enemy territory upto the distance of 1,000 km with the top speed of 9 Mach.
This type of advanced warfare weapon, is extremely difficult or nearly impossible to be intercepted by currently deployed most advanced or upcoming future missile defence systems.
In this matter, western military experts thinks that the United States has only one way to counter such type of advanced weapons, that is to deploy interceptor missiles at Incirlik airbase on Turkish Soil.
However, the use of Hypersonic Missiles like Zircon to destroy ground targets instead of destroying warships for which it was originally designed for, raises a lot of questions about its usefulness, especially in the actual battlefield.
Supersonic Missiles such as the P-800 “Yakhont or Oniks”, KH-22, KH-32, etc have been known to have very poor accuracy when hitting ground targets, because their active radar probes are not optimized for such missions. The extremely high-speed in this case is the weak point when there is no enough time to aim carefully and accurately.T
Therefore, for an extremely expensive hypersonic missile like the Zircon (offcourse hypersonic missiles are extremely expensive as compared to supersonic or other types of missiles), it would be too wasteful to force it to go on a wrong mission like mentioned in the above example.