Game Changer

Game Changer: A factor introduced into play such that the game can no longer be played in the same way.

On November 21, 2024, the Russian Federation struck the Yuzhmash Machine Building Plant in Dnipropetrovsk with the Oreshnik. The Oreshnik was a never-before-seen intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM). The Ukrainians initially thought the weapon was an RS-26 Rubezh ICBM. They could be forgiven this mistake, because the Oreshnik appears to use the RS-26 as a booster. The warhead assembly, however, is a brand-new design, probably a MIRV-capable hypersonic glide vehicle.

Oreshnik” means “hazel” in Russian, a reference to a hazel tree’s spring flowers. The new missile sports a MIRV warhead – a Multiple Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicle. In its terminal phase, the Oreshnik’s warhead bus releases six MIRVs. Such technology is not new. Both US and Russian ICBMs have been equipped with MIRV technology for decades. What is new is that the six Oreshnik MIRVs each open up and release six more submunitions, for a total of 36 warheads. Those warheads rained down on the Yuzhmash factory.

Of crucial importance, the Oreshnik warheads that struck Yuzhmash were not nuclear. They could have been, but instead, they carried no explosives at all. They relied on their hypersonic speed of Mach 10 to 12 to generate enough heat and kinetic energy to penetrate the earth and destroy the factory’s underground production halls. The attack was devastating. Russia is now able to deliver blows of strategic scale without the use of nuclear weapons.

The US, locked into its current vector of tactical conventional and tactical/strategic nuclear weapons, has been left scrambling to revise its nuclear doctrine.

The game has changed.

History: The Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty

On December 8, 1987, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The treaty entered into force in 1988 and eliminated all ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500-5,500 km (310-3,417 miles). Such weapons, deployed to Europe, would compress warning times for both sides to a matter of minutes. Such compressed warning times increase the risk of an accidental nuclear exchange that will result in World War III.

President Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States from the INF treaty in 2018. President Vladimir Putin said that Russia would continue to unilaterally observe the treaty unless the United States deployed intermediate-range missiles to Europe.