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The new missile is believed to be mostly an upgrade in electronic systems, with little or no changes to the ICBM’s range or power according to Robert Kelley, a former nuclear weapons expert from the U.S, Dept of Energy. Its important to note, however, that only one of these missiles is powerful enough to destroy huge landmasses – it is estimated that one could destroy an area as large as Texas or France, with each warhead capable of carrying 10 tons of nukes.
Absolutely ridiculous. If this is an upgrade to the R-36 family that doesn't upgrade the warheads, then we can look at the the 10-warhead variants of R-36 ("RS-36M" must be a typo; there is no such commonly used missile designation): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_(missile)
Observe that the R-36 configuration with 10 warheads delivers at most 1 megaton per warhead. That's enough to ruin any nation-state's day, but it falls woefully short of destroying the Texan/French landmass. The widest-ranging immediate effect of large nuclear explosions is burns from radiant energy; for a 1 megaton airburst you can expect third degree burns from radiant energy out to a 12.6 km radius (497 km^2 area). With 10 warheads you can inflict that level of destruction across 4970 km^2, or about 0.7%/0.8% of the total area of Texas/France. No doubt it could kill a much larger fraction of the population in either location, because humans are very concentrated in urban areas, but there's another twist: the R-36M2 Voevoda (SS-18 Mod 5) that this new missile will replace is designed for hard target kills, e.g. attacking underground bunkers or missile silos with surface bursts. That's why the new missile will have accuracy upgrades: it's easy to destroy a city via ICBM even with sloppy guidance, but hardened targets need a relatively close hit to ensure destruction. This hard target attack role means that the lethal-to-humans radius is going to be smaller and that the targets are going to be missile silos out in the middle of nowhere rather than e.g. Houston or San Antonio.
You can play with Nukemap here to see the effects: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
All in all this was an impressively high level of stupid exaggeration for a topic that needs no exaggeration at all to be sobering.
Especially considering that creating a 'no-fly zone' in Russia is being thrown around by a number of American politicians and seemed to be a core Hillary position regarding Syria. A US general recently said that doing so would basically involve starting a war with Russia and Syria: https://youtu.be/8mNgElVy7eQ?t=3m20s
I another recently heard on the War Nerd podcast that an influential US foriegn adviser was talking on Twitter (can't find the tweet just now) that we shouldn't be so scared of Russian's air defense in Syria since their S-300 [1] has been around since the 1970s, and surely we know their weaknesses by now. But this weapon is still a serious threat and this isn't even considering the fact S-400 could also be deployed. It's scary to see these threats downplayed by the people who have politician's ears while the military still takes them seriously.
So I really hope the US treads carefully in the future because the world doesn't really benefit from an escalation here. It's sad that Russia is being used as a political gambit rather carelessly. Considering there's almost always a diplomatic avenue that could be taken to avoid war but it takes careful handling which I feel is largely ignored, likely because they don't see a war with Russia as a real possibility so they don't feel the need to hold back their vitriol. But it seems those words are being taken seriously in Russia by the people who matter.
SMS: Your warhead is getting old. Purchase a new Uranium cartridge from HP for $100M dollars.
