The Kirov class, Soviet designation Project 1144 Orlan (Russian: Орлан, lit. 'sea eagle'), is a class of nuclear-powered guided-missile battlecruisers of the Soviet Navy and Russian Navy, the largest and heaviest surface combatant warships (i.e. not an aircraft carrier or amphibious assault ship) in operation in the world. Among modern warships, they are second in size only to large aircraft carriers; they are similar in size to a World War I-era battleship. Defence commentators in the West often refer to these ships as battlecruisers - due to their size and general appearance. The Soviet classification of the ship-type is "heavy nuclear-powered guided-missile cruiser" (Russian: тяжёлый атомный ракетный крейсер).
History
Originally built for the Soviet Navy, the class is named after the first of a series of four ships constructed, Admiral Ushakov, named Kirov until 1992. Original plans called for construction of five ships.
The lead ship of the class, Kirov, was laid down in March 1974 at Leningrad's Baltiysky Naval Shipyard, launched on 27 December 1977 and commissioned on 30 December 1980. When she appeared for the first time, NATO observers called her BALCOM I (Baltic Combatant I). She is presently laid up and was slated to be scrapped in 2021.
Design
The class was originally conceived to counter the U.S. Navy's submarines with its large payload of SS-N-14 anti-submarine missiles, and later evolved to carry twenty P-700 Granit anti-ship missiles for countering the U.S. carrier strike groups. Ultimately the class were intended to operate alongside new nuclear-powered aircraft carriers for global power projection, however these carriers never came to fruition.
Weapon systems
The Kirov class's main weapons are 20 P-700 Granit (SS-N-19 Shipwreck) missiles mounted in deck, designed to engage large surface targets. Air defense is provided by twelve octuple S-300F launchers with 96 missiles and a pair of Osa-MA batteries with 20 missiles each. Pyotr Velikiy carries some S-300FM missiles and is the only ship in the Russian Navy capable of ballistic missile defence.[2] The ships had some differences in sensor and weapons suites: Kirov came with Metel anti-submarine warfare (ASW) missiles, while on subsequent ships these were replaced with 3K95 Kinzhal (Russian: Кинжал – dagger) surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems. The Kinzhal installation is in fact mounted further forward of the old SS-N-14 mounting, in the structure directly behind the blast shield for the bow mounted RBU ASW rocket launcher. Kirov and Frunze had eight 30 mm (1.18 in) AK-630 close-in weapon systems, which were supplanted with the Kortik air-defence system on later ships.
Other weapons are the automatic 130 mm (5 in) AK-130 gun system (except in Kirov which had two single 100 mm (4 in) guns instead), 10 21-inch (533 mm) torpedo/missile tubes (capable of firing RPK-2 Vyuga ASW missiles on later ships) and Udav-1 with 40 anti-submarine rockets and two sextuple RBU-1000 launchers.
Russia is developing a new anti-ship missile to equip Kirovs called the 3M22 Tsirkon, which is capable of traveling at hypersonic speeds out to at least 620 mi (540 nmi; 1,000 km).
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It came out recently, she made the circuits in political and news talk shows like Democracy Now. It is this super serious step-by-step walkthrough of a bolt out of blue attack (unexpected nuclear missile/bomb attack against US). She goes minute by minute. I'm "17 minutes 30 seconds" and "18 minutes" into the attack. An ICBM is calculated to reach the U.S between 26 and 30 minutes depending on which country is launching it. In this case it was North Korea. So at 17-18 minutes, the president is notified and possibly evacuate into a bunker. Several other federal officials are also being whisked off to mountain bunkers to lead in the subsequent aftermath. Even though she continuously reminds us that it is fundamentally a world destroying event and the immediate mass casualties and subsequent death are beyond comprehension.
She tries to make it sound super scary (and the reality is actually world rending) but she writes a script or scenario that these military officers would run the President through and I just keep picturing Joe Biden or Donald Trump asking these questions or responding to military advice. You also gotta laugh cause if this scenario truly happened, military officers are supposed to explain to the president that he is the only one capable of making the decision (and would carry all of the criminal/world ending consequences), they [the officers] are merely communicating to the chain of command what the options are.
The world has not ended because no one is truly that much of a believer in whatever bullshit ideological system they have. So they can draw all of these insane plans but they'll never use them. Only ONE American military official ever commented on the utter horror and disgust he felt when they concluded drawing up these plans.
I've been getting this sense of foreboding from the Israel situation. I think if there's anyone insane enough to attack with a nuclear bomb, it is Israel.
The problem I have is that the North Korea is total bullshit and reactionary propaganda, so I'm blown away at how meticulously you could research this topic and also be like, so anyways, this mad hermit crazy person will launch an icbm and then submarines out of nowhere.
What, like, one nuke? It'd suck but unless there's a general exchange it's not going to end the world.
One nuke would activate the U.S’s hair-trigger and launch on warning operating plans, which would try to “jam the president”, that is, convince him into responding with a proportional or even larger response. So a single ICBM would alllw for military chiefs to tell the president to attack from a list of options each more destructive. In responding to North Korea, the fallout lands in China, killing between 300 and 700 million Chinese. The “simulation” has the Sec Def notifying the Chinese government only for them to say tha a nuclear launch and subsequent fallout, would be seen as an act of war and would therefore lead to retaliation.
A single nuke could cause a chain of events that destroys most of the world
that's a bit far fetched if literally nothing else happened, but a US launch toward DPRK almost has to be interpreted as a possible attack on the PRC and starts the crescendo