For second time in year, Russia will hold Thunder-2022 nuclear drills. First were held five days before full-scale invasion of Ukraine
The Russian Federation plans to conduct the "Thunder" exercises after the conclusion of the Steadfast Noon nuclear deterrence exercises, which started on October 17 and will last until October 30.
This is reported by Censor.NET with reference to Defense Express.
Russia will conduct the second nuclear deterrence exercise "Thunder-2022" this year. The first exercises took place on February 19 and were partly held near Ukraine with the launch of ballistic and cruise missiles.
The new exercises will focus on testing intercontinental ballistic missiles. Probably, the north of the Russian Federation will be the key test area.
In Russia, they traditionally check the readiness of intercontinental ballistic missiles, the service life of which for some systems has long exceeded all established standards. For example, R-36M2 "Voivode" in the amount of up to 46 missiles are responsible for delivering more than 30% of all nuclear charges of ballistic missiles. Their production ended with the collapse of the USSR, and their maximum useful life was estimated to be 2005.
And the verification of their real readiness was carried out by firing the oldest rocket, if it performed its task, the service life continued. If not, another one was started and so on until the task was completed.
The question of readiness also applies to such a ballistic missile as the Topol, which was adopted in the 1980s and was upgraded to the Topol-M in the mid-1990s. 18 Soviet "Topols" are still in service, another 78 Russian "Topol-M" were manufactured until 2011.
If we take the ground component, then 88 missiles of the Russian Federation were produced more than 30 years ago, 78 units about 20 years ago, which is almost 50% of the entire arsenal. A similar situation applies to submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
