A mighty 1000ft radioactive tsunami crashes onto the British shoreline pulverizing everything in sight and reducing entire cities to desolate wastelands.
This is the chilling image conjured up by Russian propagandists who boast of the devastating power of Putin’s most fearsome weapon: an underwater torpedo called the Poseidon.
Since Putin invaded Ukraine, his propagandists have continued to threaten the UK with a nuclear holocaust, and the rhetoric has continued to escalate in recent months. Just yesterday retired Russian General Yevgeny Buzhinsky urged Putin to launch Poseidon, still said to be in development, which he said would destroy Britain.
And now, international military experts have warned that Putin’s underwater torpedo could destroy Britain’s coastal cities, cause radioactive flooding and kill millions of people in London.
While experts deny Russia’s claims that Poseidon would unleash freakishly high waves of 1,000 feet, around the height of the Eiffel Tower, or destroy the entire country, they say the effects of such a nuclear strike would still be “devastating.” ‘.
If Russia launched the Poseidon from its ‘doomsday’ submarine and the torpedo exploded in the Thames estuary, for example, a tidal wave would erupt from the water’s surface and destroy London, academics say.
If Russia launched the Poseidon from its ‘doomsday’ submarine and the torpedo exploded in the Thames estuary, for example, a tidal wave would erupt from the water’s surface and destroy London, experts say.
While international military experts deny that the Poseidon would cause waves as monstrously high as 1,000 feet, around the height of the Eiffel Tower, or destroy the entire country, they say the effects of such a nuclear strike would still be “devastating.” ‘
“If the Poseidon is armed with a large megaton warhead, it would certainly cause damage,” Professor Andrew Futter, an academic at the University of Leicester and an expert on nuclear weapons, told MailOnline.
“If a large nuclear device were detonated in or near the Thames estuary, the tide in the Thames could rise towards the buildings and millions of people could potentially die in the explosion. There would be a lot of damage. The reality is that a large megaton explosion, even in water, would be very destructive.
“The immediate concern would not be about radiation because a large number of people would be killed by the explosion, blast wave or burns first.”
Futter added: “It’s possible it would leave the Thames irradiated, but there would be so few people left alive in central London that it wouldn’t really make much of a difference.”
Dr Rod Thornton, a security expert at King’s College London, says the Poseidon torpedo would ‘annihilate’ any city near the blast, be it London or New York in the US.
Thornton says that if the Poseidon were to explode off the coast of south east England, thousands of people along the coast could be killed by the nuclear blast. he he explains that the tidal wave would be bigger if Poseidon were thrown into deeper water.
Just yesterday, retired Russian General Yevgeny Buzhinsky urged Putin to launch the Poseidon underwater drone (pictured) which he said would unleash a 1,000-foot-tall radioactive tsunami and destroy the entire UK.
A clip surfaced in 2019 showing the Poseidon, seen by military officials as a giant nuclear-capable torpedo, during a test launch.
The footage shows military officials overseeing the test launch of Poseidon, which can supposedly be launched from a submarine.
Thornton says that if Russia launched the Poseidon from a submarine in the middle of the North Sea, it would “create a rather ‘small’ tsunami.”
But the wave, if it flooded London, would kill everyone there. It would wipe out the city,” Thornton says. “And the same wave could kill everyone in all the channel ports in the UK and France, and maybe even as far as Rotterdam.”
Last year, Russian propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov, a man known as ‘Putin’s mouthpiece’, urged Putin to wipe the UK off the map with the Poseidon underwater drone while standing in front of a background graphic showing the UK Kingdom being washed away by a tidal wave.
But while Putin’s propagandists have claimed that Poseidon would destroy the UK with 1,000-foot waves the size of the Eiffel Tower, military experts disagree.
“It would have to be a phenomenally massive nuclear explosion to create a tidal wave that would cover the whole of the UK. I just think it’s not physically possible to do that,” says Futter.
“It would certainly move a large volume of water, although it is unlikely to create a true tsunami on the scale we often see in the Pacific Ocean,” James Rogers, director of research at the Geostrategy Council, told MailOnline.
“We would certainly see large water movements locally, although that would probably be no less relevant than the heat and blast damage from the blast.”
Thornton explains that the Poseidon, which is made up of a 65ft tube that is nearly 6ft in diameter, would travel on a “doomsday” Russian submarine to the waters off the UK or US coast. ., a journey that would take a few days.
The torpedo would then be launched from the 30,000 Belgorod submarine and travel remotely towards shorelines before detonating and causing a huge explosion.
The 184 m (604 ft) Belgorod submarine is the largest submarine built in 30 years and is said to be able to be armed with six Poseidon nuclear torpedo drones.
The torpedo would then be launched from the Belgorod 30,000 submarine (pictured) and travel remotely towards shorelines before detonating and causing a huge explosion.
The Belgorod is an Oscar-II missile cruise submarine, which is modified to perform covert missions and carry the large Poseidon nuclear torpedoes.
What is known for certain is that the Poseidon is the largest torpedo ever built.
The Poseidon tube is believed to contain a nuclear reactor which theoretically gives the drone unlimited range if it travels on a pre-set course towards its target.
In order for an operator to control the drone, they would have to stay within range of some sort of control tower.
black James, RAND Europe’s Deputy Director of Defense and Security says the Poseidon could travel “undetected for extended periods.” “This introduces additional uncertainty into Western defense and deterrence planning.”
He agreed with military experts in terms of the carnage Poseidon could cause.
“It would be capable of threatening coastal targets hundreds of thousands of miles from its launch point,” says Black.
While the exact payload of the Poseidon is unknown, the size of the nuclear warhead seen in the leaked designs suggests it could have a yield of up to 100 megatons.
That would make Poseidon roughly twice as powerful as the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear bomb ever created, which destroyed everything within a 60-mile radius when tested in 1961, shattering windows of buildings up to a distance away. 560 miles.
However, Professor Futter says that Russia has provided no evidence that Poseidon has a 100-megaton warhead. He says it’s more likely to have a warhead between three and five megatons, which is still big, but on a smaller magnitude scale.
