Russia has designed the world’s biggest dirty “doomsday bomb”, a sleeper weapon on the ocean floor that is activated remotely.
The deadly Skif missile is nuclear-powered and lies offshore, ready to be used as a last resort if war breaks out between East and West.
Once activated, it has a range of 6,000 miles, travels at 60mph and a blast that will contaminate large areas of the sea and shore with the synthetic radioactive element Cobalt-60.
The toxic nuke is so big it has to be lowered into the ocean from a specially adapted ship and would create devastating and long-lasting damage.
While dormant, the 25-metre, 100-ton monster can wait for years, lying on the sea-bed as deep as 3,000 feet.
In February, experts spotted a large object which they first believed was an updated version of Moscow’s “tsunami-maker” Poseidon drone but is now believed to be the Skif.
The Poseidon emerged in 2015 as a nuclear drone, with the power to spark a coastal city-smashing tsunami.
But experts now believe this year’s sighting was actually of the Skif, aboard the classified Russian vessel Akademik Aleksandrov during sea trials.
The ship was transferred quietly to the Russian navy on April 12 at the Arctic port of Severomorsk, Murmansk.
It is assigned to the top-secret Unit No.40056 “the Main Directorate for Deep-Water Research” and is seen as the launch vessel for the device.
As a wartime last resort it could hit ports either side of the Atlantic and could be positioned around the Greenland-Iceland- UK gap and in the North Sea.
If detonated, the device could destroy a number of ships and poison seas around the British Isles or American coast for years.
It is the latest in a string of maritime weapons the Kremlin has invented to target the West.
Paul Schulte, former UK MoD arms control director, said: “The Skif appears to be
a last-resort doomsday weapon, intended to symbolise that Russia ‘can never be defeated’.
“It poses an outlandish strategic challenge to the West.”
- A Royal Navy warship recently had to shadow a Russian war vessel as it sailed through the English Channel, it was revealed yesterday.
