In the Orenburg region of the southern Urals, the Russian Defense Ministry on Saturday put its fearsome “Avangard” hypersonic missile into combat duty at the Yasnenskoye missile formation. It is one of the six “next generation” weapons that Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled in March 2018, according to the Russian news agency TASS.
the Russian hypersonic glider
According to the TASS source, the Avangard warhead can manoeuvre and outclass any missile defence while travelling at a hypersonic speed of roughly 32,000 kmph.
The USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republic) started researching hypersonic warheads in the middle of the 1980s, which led to the development of the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV), according to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an American think tank.
The project was supposedly restarted in the middle of the 1990s under the name “Project 4202,” according to the source. However, the initial effort was abandoned due to the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
In addition, the CSIS study asserted that this missile is nuclear-capable, has a range of about 6,000 km, weighs around 2,000 kg, and can transport either a nuclear or conventional payload.
According to the TASS source, the nuclear warhead on the missile is “more than 2 megatons in TNT (trinitrotoluene) equivalent.”
According to CSIS, Avangard’s manoeuvrability might make its trajectory unpredictable, making intercept attempts after its boost phase more challenging.
Between 1990 and 2018, the Avangard had about 14 flight tests, according to a CSIS report.
