Russia’s Oreshnik Attack Proves It’s Harmless In Non-Nuclear Configuration

While some tremulous western media - here’s looking at you, again, New York Times - are today reporting that Russia’s launch of an Oreshnik intercontinental ballistic missile was intended to intimidate and has ‘rattled’ Europeans, the reality according to actual experts, is quite the opposite.

The Oreshnik was designed as a delivery system for nuclear weapons. Period. It has neither the accuracy nor the power to be an effective conventional delivery system, as the strike on the Lviv region proved. JL

Espreso Global reports:

The strike on Ukraine’s Lviv region demonstrates that Russia’s Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile poses minimal threat when deployed without nuclear warheads due to its limited kinetic energy and poor accuracy. Kinetic impacts lack both the blast effect and fragmentation produced by conventional high-explosive warheads. Accuracy presents another critical limitation. The guidance systems for independently targeted warheads on intermediate-range missiles separate the warheads onto different trajectories at altitudes of several hundred kilometers. From these heights, they fall toward targets with accuracy that, for Soviet-era technology, falls with inert "kinetic" warheads means hitting specific targets would be purely accidental.

The recent strike on Ukraine’s Lviv region demonstrates that Russia’s experimental intermediate-range ballistic missile, while technologically sophisticated, poses minimal threat when deployed without nuclear warheads due to its limited kinetic energy and poor accuracy

Russia launched its second Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile strike on January 8 at 11:47 p.m., targeting the Lviv region in western Ukraine. The attack marked only the second use of this weapon system since its debut strike on the city of Dnipro on November 21, 2024.

Lviv Mayor Andrii Sadovyi reported that the shock wave from the impact triggered automatic safety systems in the gas supply network in Rudno, a western suburb, temporarily cutting service to 376 customers. Video footage captured six warhead components entering the atmosphere without subsequent detonation, indicating they were mass-dimension mockups rather than armed warheads—the same configuration used in the Dnipro strike.

Defense analysts note a key difference from the previous attack: this time the warhead components fell without the decoy targets typically designed to confuse missile defense systems. This "kinetic" configuration, as Russia describes it, renders the Oreshnik essentially incapable of causing significant damage.

The Oreshnik is believed to be a modernized version of the Soviet-era RSD-10 Pioneer intermediate-range ballistic missile, which carried a 1,500-kilogram payload divided among three independently targeted warheads weighing 290 kilograms each. The new Oreshnik distributes a similar 1.5-ton payload across six warheads instead of three, along with its guidance system, decoys, and missile defense countermeasures.

Military experts estimate each Oreshnik warhead weighs approximately 150 kilograms—comparable to the American W76 nuclear warhead used on Trident submarine-launched missiles. When intermediate-range ballistic missile warheads descend through the dense lower atmosphere, they decelerate from 3-4 kilometers per second to approximately 1.5-1.8 kilometers per second. At such velocities, each kilogram of mass transfers roughly 1.4 megajoules of energy upon impact.

A 150-kilogram inert warhead striking at approximately Mach 5 would deliver about 210 megajoules of energy—equivalent to roughly 50 kilograms of TNT, since one kilogram of TNT releases 4.2 megajoules. However, kinetic impacts lack both the blast effect and fragmentation produced by conventional high-explosive warheads, making direct comparisons to even a FAB-100 aerial bomb misleading despite similar explosive content.

Accuracy presents another critical limitation. The guidance systems for independently targeted warheads on intermediate-range ballistic missiles separate the warheads onto different trajectories in space at altitudes of several hundred kilometers. From these heights, they fall toward targets with accuracy that, at best, falls within a 100-meter margin of error—and for Soviet-era technology, closer to 300-500 meters.

Such accuracy with inert "kinetic" warheads means hitting specific targets would be purely accidental. However, a 100-meter margin becomes irrelevant when discussing nuclear warheads, where each component could carry a 300-kiloton yield. The Oreshnik, as an intermediate-range ballistic missile, was designed specifically for such nuclear warheads—a capability Russia already possessed through other delivery systems.

The strikes appear designed primarily for psychological impact and weapons testing rather than tactical military effect, underscoring the weapon’s true purpose as a nuclear delivery system rather than a conventional precision strike platform.