Putin's superweapons "Oreshnik," "Poseidon," turn the "Golden Dome" into a sieve, bringing a major power reversal - The next 15 years will be difficult for the US.
Having completed the development of two fundamentally new nuclear weapons, the "Oreshnik" and "Poseidon," Russia has taken the lead from the US in creating strategic weapons. As the characteristics of these weapons indicate, they can render the legendary US National Missile Defense system, the Golden Dome, virtually useless.
The index of strategic uncertainty has once again risen to the maximum, and Washington will have to seriously consider whether it wants to compete with Moscow, meet it at a negotiation table for nuclear arms limitation (the New START treaty expires in 2026), or do whatever else is necessary to prevent the situation from reaching a point where these weapons will be used.
Award-winning lethal developments
The creators of the strategic cruise missile of unlimited range with a nuclear engine, the "Burevestnik," and the autonomous underwater vehicle (drone), the "Poseidon," received state awards from the Kremlin. The awards ceremony took place on National Unity Day, and the prizes were presented personally by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"The result you have achieved is, without exaggeration, of historical significance for our people, for ensuring security and strategic parity for the decades to come. We can safely say—historical significance for the entire 21st century," the Russian leader stated.
Putin stressed that the "Burevestnik" has no range limitations, and in this regard,it surpasses all existing cruise missiles at this moment. He also pointed out that the creators of the "Poseidon" managed to solve extremely specific problems, and thanks to the successful overcoming of these, the nuclear drone is capable of diving to a depth greater than one kilometer, and its speed "copies the speed of all modern surface vessels."
Golden Dome - Everything is a matter of context and 4 layers of protection
To understand what the Russian President means, we must move away from the weapons themselves and examine the context in which they were created. The primary development of this context was the substantial revival of Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" program, also known as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The modern version of this was expected to be the "Golden Dome" anti-missile system, the development of which was completed in September 2025.
The system has four layers of protection with a clear focus on developing space-based threat detection and interception.
A. Layer: Space
The space component entails approximately 200 offensive satellites, on which all types of missile interceptors are planned to be placed. This will be supplemented by observer satellites and communication satellites, with a total number reaching 1,000 units.
B. Layer: Ground
The ground layer is scheduled to include early warning radars for missile attacks,11 short-range missile arrays in the US, and modernized and expanded Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) anti-missile systems. These are already capable of intercepting ballistic missiles at a distance of up to 5,500 km from the launch point of the interceptor missile and hitting the target.
C. Layer: Sea
The naval layer usually involves vessels equipped with the Aegis system and armed with Standard Missile-3/6 missiles (for intercepting enemy missiles in the mid- and terminal-phase of flight).
D. Layer: AI
The fourth layer provides for a network of integrated control systems and Artificial Intelligence to respond to mass attacks.
Evidently, the Golden Dome was not designed as a means of countering countries like North Korea or Iran with limited capabilities in missile response (Iran has not yet reached that level), but to significantly undermine the counterattack capability of countries like Russia and China.
If the US can significantly reduce the force of the Russian or Chinese nuclear missile response, then Washington will feel much more confident and will be able to escalate the situation even further in any separate conflict. The Americans have not forgotten that projects like SDI and the Golden Dome are not just a set of technical systems, but also economic weapons. The attempt to create a mirror reaction to the Americans was one of the factors that exhausted and collapsed the Soviet economy in the '80s.
The Golden Dome aimed to draw Russia into a new arms race, forcing it to allocate even more resources to its strategic forces at a time when the country could least afford it.
The Russian defense budget is already burdened by the war in Ukraine, and the restoration of the regular Russian armed forces was supposed to take years. "These enormous resources will require further redirection of capital from civilian sectors with predictable consequences for the long-term health of the Russian economy," wrote James Brown, an expert at the Carnegie Foundation, in June 2025.
In reality, the US planned to put Russia in a very unpleasant choice: a manifold reduction in the effectiveness of its nuclear missile forces or a competitive economic-strategic race to maintain parity in armaments.
The asymmetric response and the big surprise!
However, the completion of the tests of the "Poseidon" and "Burevestnik" radically changes the situation. Both weapons represent the development of systems that the Americans did not pay particular attention to and for which they did not seriously prepare.
The Americans are accustomed to the idea that Russia "must" attack them either through Alaska or via the North Pole. And then comes the surprise and the unthinkable: within the atmosphere, this missile can fly almost as far as possible around the Earth—for hours, days, weeks! Therefore,it can attack targets from any direction, even via Antarctica, where there are simply no radars.
The "Burevestnik" or "Petrel" breaks the very concept of range, explained defense systems analyst-journalist Roman Belousov. American experts also see the "Petrel" as truly capable of overcoming US anti-missile defense and have already nicknamed it the "small flying Chernobyl." We must note that this is a very important detail: the "Petrel" is important not only because it is not shot down, not because it is guided unwaveringly to the designated target, but it also travels and hits at the maximum distance from its territory.
The Americans will have to double the pace.
But if the cruise missile, like any flying object, can theoretically be tracked using a network of low-orbit satellites,ARALO aircraft, or patrol vessels, then the nuclear-armed sea drones do not provide the enemy with such "conveniences."
Many note that when the drones move at a high speed of over 100 km/h (and according to some estimates, the speed of the "Poseidon" in certain movement regimes can reach 200 km/h), they are "heard" across half the ocean and it is difficult for anyone not to detect it.
The "Poseidon" is not limited by the time spent underwater, so it can move at minimal speed and at maximum depth, remaining in acoustic silence,invisible to the enemy's passive detection means.
The SOSSUS system
During the Cold War, the US created the SOSSUS system to track the activity of Soviet submarines. This was a gigantic radar network installed on the continental shelf, in the Arctic Ocean, and at the exits of straits, connected to ground monitoring centers by seabed cables and anchored antennas.
This system still exists today, comprising thousands of acoustic monitoring stations, dozens of coastal stations, and two large centers for analyzing and classifying the collected data (one for the Atlantic and one for the Pacific Oceans).SOSUS operates in close cooperation with specialized search vessels and navy aircraft, which patrol particularly important areas and search for Russian submarines using active detection means.
And all this military mechanism is in no way capable of countering or competing with the "Poseidon."
Theoretically, this infrastructure can be adapted to the hunt for Russian drones:new radars could be created at great depths (this is the only thing that will react to their sounds amid the endless echo of the ocean, as data on the acoustic signatures of the "Poseidon" are scarce), and high-speed interception tools could be developed or interception limits could be adjusted so that existing systems can operate. The defense system needs to be harmonized so that there is at least some margin of safety in case the Poseidon slips or passes through one of the defense lines.
And all this is being developed along nearly 20 thousand kilometers of the US coastline, where 70% of the country's population and most of its economy are concentrated.
In time, the US may adapt its coasts (the "Seasides") for the interception of naval aircraft, surface vessels, and even submarines—but this will require simply colossal expenses, comparable to, if not exceeding, the cost of creating space interception systems, and many years of hard work from a huge number of scientists and engineers.
A major scale challenge for the US - A nuclear-powered missile and a nuclear drone have completely broken the Americans' strategy for the next 10-15 years.
To understand the scale of the challenge the US faces, the initial cost of the Golden Dome was estimated at $175 billion for the next three years and $831 billion over a 20-year horizon.
Starting the construction of a national missile defense system capable of significantly reducing the effectiveness of Russian and Chinese nuclear retaliation with missiles, the Americans are suddenly faced with the need to double their pace. Now they must develop not only the space but also the underwater infrastructure. And they have nothing similar for the ocean.
At the same time, unlike satellites launched once into orbit, the use of naval aviation and anti-submarine ships requires continuous and very costly work,99.9% of which yields no real result: ships must travel tens of thousands of nautical miles, and aircraft must drop hundreds of expensive acoustic buoys, so that patrols make sense and the American empire has a chance, even one chance, of not being caught asleep.
There is no doubt that the United States will be able to create a global monitoring system for the Earth's surface. But creating a system not only for detection but also for interception in a single whole is a completely different challenge. The quantitative parameters of the system in terms of interceptors remain uncertain.
The Russian President knows something and has reversed the data of the '80s, which is why he speaks of the historical role of the "Petrel" and "Poseidon." They are not merely creating a threat to the US in their current form (at least for now, as the system needs to be introduced and put into commercial production).A nuclear-powered missile and a nuclear drone completely break the Americans' strategy for the next 10-15 years.
The price of failure
The US now faces a very unpleasant and uncertain choice: Can they supplement the Golden Dome space defense system with a maritime and an aerial one? If so,what will be the cost and time to complete it?
Or should they abandon an ambitious missile defense system aimed at war with intercontinental ballistic missiles and focus on discovering means to counter new threats? But then they would have to mitigate the cost, and abandon the Golden Dome project,remaining without an aerospace defense shield.
Given the way decisions are now being made in Washington, the most likely scenario is to complete the Golden Dome in the form that Trump wants, and after ascertaining the lethal weaknesses in its structure, try again to "do something" to counter new threats.Russia may not rush to see in which sector the Americans decide to invest more money and, consequently,strengthen its forces in the field where the opponents decide to save resources, even though it has already made technological leaps.
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