Mother Russia Rattles Her Saber

After two failed missile launches during highly publicized military maneuvers, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday announced plans for deploying a new generation of strategic weapons and said Moscow may build new missile defenses.

Some analysts said the new weapons may be warheads that zigzag on their way to a target, an idea dating to the Soviet era.

Putin spoke after watching Wednesday's launch of a military satellite from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in northern Russia, which was part of the largest exercise of the nation's strategic forces in 20 years.

"The experiments conducted during these maneuvers ... have proven that state-of-the art technical complexes will enter service with the Russian Strategic Missile Forces in the near future," Putin said in remarks broadcast by Russian television stations.

The new weapons will be "capable of hitting targets continents away at hypersonic speed, with high precision and the ability of broad maneuver both in terms of altitude and direction of their flight," Putin said.

He added that the new weapons, which he described as unrivaled in the world, would "reliably ensure Russia's strategic security for a long historical perspective."

Putin said that Russia was continuing research in missile defense systems and may build a new missile shield in the future, but added that "putting big money in that is premature." Russia currently has a missile defense system protecting Moscow that was designed in the 1970s and modernized in the 1990s.

Referring to Washington's assurances that its prospective missile defense wasn't aimed against Russia, Putin said that "just like that, the development of our new weapons systems wasn't directed against the United States."

"Modern Russia has no imperial ambitions or hegemonist strivings," he said.

Putin didn't elaborate on prospective weapons, but some military analysts said his statement could indicate the revival of Soviet designs for nuclear warheads that zigzag on their final approach to a target, cheating a missile defense system.

Chaotic maneuvering of such a warhead would make it hard to intercept and destroy compared to a conventional warhead which glides steadily through the atmosphere on its way to target, said Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent Russian military analyst.

"On the other hand, its accuracy leaves much to be desired, making it unfit for dealing precision strikes," Felgenhauer said in a telephone interview. He said that the research on zigzagging warheads began in the 1980s in response to Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program.

Alexander Pikayev, a Moscow-based expert in Russian nuclear forces, said that the military had experimented with a maneuvering warhead during a missile launch several years ago, but voiced doubt about Russia's ability to deploy such weapons any time soon.

Ivan Safranchuk, the head of the Moscow office of the Center for Defense Information, a Washington-based think-tank, said that Putin's statement could refer to the prospective Bulava ballistic missile being developed to re-equip the navy.

Putin in Plesetsk watched the successful launch Wednesday of a Molniya-M booster rocket, which carried a Kosmos military satellite into orbit. Later Wednesday, the military successfully test-fired a Topol ballistic missile from Plesetsk and an RS-18 ballistic missile from the Baikonur cosmodrome which Russia leases from Kazakhstan.

"We have not had such exercises for almost 20 years," Putin said. "Naturally, in the course of such exercises there are minuses and pluses ... and those minuses will be detected and clearly we'll be drawing conclusions. It is only for the better."

It was his first public acknowledgment of any shortcomings in the exercises. The navy's failure to launch missiles from nuclear submarines on two consecutive days tarnished the maneuvers, widely seen as part of campaign efforts aimed at playing up Putin's image as a leader bent on restoring Russia's military power and global clout ahead of the March 14 presidential election.

A missile launch from the Novomoskovsk nuclear submarine set for Tuesday didn't take place, and the navy claimed that it had never been planned despite numerous earlier statements to the contrary.

In an apparent attempt to rehabilitate itself after the failure, the navy sent another Northern Fleet nuclear submarine to the Barents Sea to repeat the launch on Wednesday — only to fail again.

The missile launched from the Karelia submarine started erring from its designated flight path 98 seconds after launch and was blown up by its self-liquidation system, Russian Navy spokesman Capt. Igor Dygalo told The Associated Press. No one was hurt, he said in a telephone interview.

Retired Adm. Vladimir Chernavin, the former Soviet Navy chief, said that until the cause of the failed launch is found, "it's hard to talk about full combat readiness of the navy's strategic nuclear forces," the Interfax-Military News Agency reported.