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Russia has developed new railway missile complex "Barguzin" able to tow up to six Yars missiles 2712

Military Defense Technology - Barguzin railway missile complex

Saturday, December 27, 2014 10:09 AM

Russia has developed new railway missile complex "Barguzin" able to tow up to six Yars missiles.

Last week the head of Russia's Strategic Missile Force, Lieutenant General Sergey Karakayev, revealed that the future missile platform would be called Barguzin. Now a source in the Russian military, which preferred to remain anonymous, has revealed some details of the weapon to Russian news agencies.

In the 1970s, the Soviet Union developed a train to transport and deploy the RT-23 "Molodets" intercontinental ballistic missile, known to the West as the SS-24 "Scalpel."

A Russian military source outlined the capabilities of Barguzin strategic missile train. The country may roll out five such disguised mobile launch platforms each carrying six RS-24 Yars missiles in five years.

A ‘nuclear train’ – properly called BZhRK, short for ‘combat railway missile complex’ in Russian – is a mobile platform for transporting and launching strategic nuclear missiles. Similarly to nuclear submarines, such trains are hard to wipe out in a preemptive strike because of their mobility and ability to be disguised as regular freight trains.

Like the RT-23 Molodets (NATO reporting name SS-24 Scalpel), Barguzin’s carriages carrying missiles would be disguised as refrigerator cars. But since a Yars missile weights roughly half of what a Molodets missile did, the cars would not need reinforced wheel-sets to carry the load. This would make the trains harder to identify from the ground.

The RT-23 was a Soviet ICBM (InterContinental Ballistic Missile) developed and produced by the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau before 1991. It is cold-launched, and comes in silo– and railway-car–based variants. It is a three-stage missile that uses solid fuel and thrust vectoring for the first stage, with 10 MIRV warheads, each with a 550–kt yield.

The weight difference also means that a single nuclear train would be able to carry more individual missiles. According to designs of the Moscow Institute of Thermal Technology, the weapon platform’s developer, each Barguzin would be able to tow up to six Yars missiles, the source said.

Last week the head of Russia's Strategic Missile Force, Lieutenant General Sergey Karakayev, revealed that the future missile platform would be called Barguzin. Now a source in the Russian military, which preferred to remain anonymous, has revealed some details of the weapon to Russian news agencies.

Russian RS-24 Yars Nuclear Intercontinental ballistic missile

The destructive potential of the new platform would probably be smaller than that of its predecessor however. Molodets missiles had 10 MIRVed warheads with a total yield of 5.5 megatons. RS-24 Yars reportedly has four warheads with a total yield of between 0.4 and 1.2 megatons. The more advanced Yars, however, is more accurate and has greater range.

Organizationally, each train with its personnel would constitute a single regiment of the Strategic Missile Force (RVSN).

“The BZhRKs Barguzin will be delivered to one of the RVSN divisions organized into five regiments,” the source said. “The timeline for finishing the development is 2018.”

The first Barguzin is likely to go into service in 2019, the source said. The Russian military expects the nuclear trains to remain in service until at least 2040.