"Nuclear Train" - combat railway missile system- a favorite horror story in conversations about strategic weapons, second only, perhaps, to the legendary “neutron bomb”. Recently, Russian citizens were informed of the refusal to launch the new Barguzin BZHRK into series production. We'll think about it - was it really needed?

On a black, black night, a black, black train rushes across a snowy, snowy field and carries nuclear, nuclear missiles. This is approximately how the work of a combat railway missile system (BZHRK) appears to ordinary people. Indistinguishable from ordinary trains, it secretly runs across the vast expanses of our country. Inside, stern and wary military men sit, drink tea from glasses with cup holders and think about the fate of the Motherland, ready at any moment to launch missiles with a nuclear warhead.

It recently became known that the development of the new generation Barguzin BZHRK was stopped at the design stage. And this is not as bad as it might seem at first, and certainly does not imply serious gaps in our country’s nuclear shield. The thing is that a train with nuclear missiles was an ideal weapon only from the point of view of intimidating ordinary people. On the practical side, there were a lot of questions about this miracle of technology. Let's start from the beginning: in the previous approach to the topic, 12 trains were formed, each of which carried three missiles, for a total of 36. Compared to the total Soviet arsenal, this was a drop in the ocean.

The RT-23 Molodets combat railway missile systems have been on combat duty since 1987. In 2003–2007, they were disposed of under the START II treaty, but two demilitarized launchers were preserved as museums.

In general, the main task of any mobile carrier is to quietly get to the optimal launch point, shoot back and try to escape alive at maximum speed. The ones that can get closest to the enemy are submarines and missile-carrying aircraft, which are more suitable than others for all sorts of cunning plans, with launches from unexpected places and along a non-standard trajectory.

Mobile systems on wheels will cope with this worse, but they can move like cockroaches - they can easily change direction and run away after striking in different directions. The train, as Andrei Makarevich rightly noted, “will only travel where the track is laid.”

Now let's look at the map of the railways of our country. It is possible to effectively hide a train from the all-seeing eyes of satellites only in the European part of Russia, where there is an extensive network of railways. Chasing it along the Trans-Siberian Railway is fun, but stupid. But in the European part of the BZHRK will not feel at ease: for last years The average daily speed of transport trains has decreased significantly due to the need to frequently stop and wait for passenger trains and amounts to - damm! - nine kilometers per hour! That is, even if the spy satellite takes pictures of Barguzin once a day, it will not go further than 200 kilometers from the last photograph.

Now a little about the notorious invisibility. There are memories online of “seasoned” railway workers who found themselves unable to distinguish the Soviet BZHRK “Molodets” from an ordinary train. To be honest, I don’t really believe this. Three locomotives, followed by three passenger carriages, four mail cars, and then refrigerator cars with not four, but eight axles. Do you often see such trains? In general, a mix of passenger and refrigerator cars is already a very rare occurrence on the railway. It was assumed that the new “Barguzins” would use conventional four-axle cars, but this would not improve the situation much, although, of course, they would not stand out as radically as the “Molodtsy” with their systems for redistributing weight to neighboring cars.

Believe me, all workers from the control room to the depot will know that a “nuclear train” has arrived. And in the era of mobile phones, Instagram and ubiquitous geolocation, this will turn into a fascinating game of searching the hashtag #nucleartrain and #barguzin on the Internet. A photo with a train with rockets in the background is wonderful. What can we say about modern digital wagon accounting systems that can set fire to such trains the moment they enter the line. As a result, we have a very interesting, technically complex and expensive project of dubious usefulness. Again, as a scary bedtime story, the nuclear train is ideal. It stops in an open field, and special retractable devices rise from the power station car. They short-circuit the contact network, sparks and lightning fly in all directions, and over the next few kilometers all electric trains stop. Then the wires are pulled to the sides, the rockets are lifted and thrown out of the launcher to a small height, the propulsion engines are turned on, and now the gifts are already flying towards the peacefully sleeping Oklahoma. If you see this in a dream, you will wake up in a cold sweat.

From the point of view of practical implementation, everything is very expensive, complicated and once again expensive. The system has passed the challenge tests, which means that in case of strict necessity it can be quickly brought to practical implementation. For now, our train will “stand on a siding,” and that’s okay. For those who want to shed tears over “we are in Soviet times, wow,” I recommend visiting the St. Petersburg Museum of Railway Equipment near the Baltic Station. The BZHRK “Molodets” is there - you can feel nostalgic.

22:24 — REGNUM Despite active advertising and rumors about the presence of the Barguzin combat railway complex (BZHRK) in State program weapons for the period from 2018 to 2027 (GPV-2027), the development of the “nuclear train” was stopped. Why could such a decision be made and will it damage Russia's defense capabilities?

Modest Kolerov © IA REGNUM

Has most of the work on the development of the Barguzin BZHRK been completed?

BZHRK "Barguzin" is not a pioneer in its concept. The first (and only) train carrying intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) was adopted by the USSR in 1987 and was called the RT-23 UTTH “Molodets”. One such train transported 3 solid-fuel ICBMs, each of which carried 10 individually targetable nuclear warheads. A total of 12 such trains were produced, the main problem of which was their too large mass - together with the launch container, the 15Zh61 ICBM weighed about 126 tons. As a result, on patrol routes it was necessary to strengthen the railway track and often repair it, which naturally affected secrecy (as did the need to use two diesel locomotives to move the train). According to an agreement with the United States, by 2005 all BZHRKs were officially withdrawn from service, and by 2007 they were destroyed.

The development of the Barguzin BZHRK, according to available information, has been underway since 2012. In 2016, successful throw tests of the complex were carried out, which actually means the high readiness of the launch car, which is the basis of the BZHRK. There was no need to develop a new ICBM for the Barguzin - the RS-24 Yars ICBM, which is more than half the weight of the 15Zh61, is perfectly suited to the requirements, which makes the launch cars no heavier than ordinary freight cars. In total, according to available data, it was planned to use 5-6 Yars ICBMs in one composition, in total they could carry 20-24 nuclear warheads. Thus, apparently, the project has been brought to the stage where many years of work are no longer needed to create a production model.

Disadvantages of the BZHRK concept

Of course, the information about the termination of the development of Barguzin cannot be called final - this news was confirmed by official sources I haven't received it yet. For all the apparent attractiveness of the BZHRK concept, several arguments can be given in favor of this still proposed solution. Let's start with the fact that satellite surveillance and reconnaissance tools have become an order of magnitude more sensitive over the past years and provide constant surveillance (rather than sending images delayed in time), which means that a train can theoretically be taken under surveillance at the moment it enters the railway tracks with permanent locations. And in this case, the train will travel outside the completely open and clear schedule of railway transportation, which will also attract attention. Making ordinary train stations permanent locations is prohibited by the START-3 treaty, according to Article IV of which ICBM launchers can only be based at ICBM bases, and from a purely moral point of view, this is unacceptable (makes large railway junctions the primary target for the enemy’s strategic nuclear weapons) . In addition, the operation of “nuclear trains” within the current schedule of railway transportation will lead to additional risks of sabotage and terrorist activities, since too strong guarding of trains by army units will also attract unnecessary attention.

Accordingly, the BZHRK can be used with high efficiency only if there are real risks of a war on the part of the United States (when the above risks are worth it), and in the format of an effective preventive strike on Russian strategic nuclear forces. However, in reality, such risks do not exist today, despite the dissatisfaction of the Russian leadership with the development of US missile defense.

There is another factor playing against the production of BZHRK at the moment - a reduction in defense spending. Although sufficient funds have been allocated for Russia’s strategic nuclear forces, they are still limited. At the same time, the task is to complete the development of very important projects for the heavy RS-28 Sarmat ICBM and the light RS-26 Rubezh ICBM, as well as to continue the production of the RS-24 Yars ICBM and submarine-launched ballistic missiles for the strategic submarine fleet. In fact, the required number of mobile ICBMs “Topol-M” and “Yars” (and in the future “Rubezh”) is quite sufficient to resist a massive non-nuclear disarming strike ( cruise missiles and promising hypersonic gliders are suitable for striking stationary targets).

Thus, the termination of the development of the Barguzin BZHRK has its own logic. Having a serious foundation on this topic will allow, if necessary, to quickly return to the project and bring it to the state of a serial product. Now all that remains is to wait for official confirmation or denial from representatives of the Russian Ministry of Defense. At the same time, the most important thing now is to focus on completing the development of the RS-28 Sarmat ICBM, which is progressing behind schedule.

The topic of creating a new generation of rocket trains is closed, at least for the near future. This was reported by an informed representative of the Russian military-industrial complex.

Let us recall the chronology of the beginning and end of the service of the Soviet strategic BZHRK “Molodets”, or “Scalpel”, according to Western classification, as well as the undeveloped biography of the Russian “Barguzin”.

The order “On the creation of a mobile combat railway missile system (BZHRK) with the RT-23 missile” was signed on January 13, 1969. Yuzhnoye Design Bureau, located in Dnepropetrovsk, was appointed the lead developer. The entire railway missile system was called RT-23 UTTH and given the name “Well done.” The first regiment of missile trains went on combat duty in October 1987. By the beginning of 1991, three BZHRK missile divisions were deployed. In the USA, after conducting a lot of “spy” research, they became convinced that they were not able to reliably track the movement of such trains, despite a number of unmasking factors, and guarantee their destruction.

And even before the collapse of the USSR, at the insistence of the West, BZHRKs began to carry out combat duty only at permanent deployment points, without traveling to the country’s railway network. That is, their main advantage - mobility and stealth - have been reduced to zero.

In January 1993, Boris Yeltsin and George W. Bush signed the START II Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. According to its terms, Russia had to decommission and liquidate all its BZHRKs - a total of 12 trains with 36 launchers. At the beginning of May 2005, the then commander of the Strategic Missile Forces, Colonel General Nikolai Solovtsov, officially announced that the BZHRK had been removed from combat duty in the Strategic Missile Forces. By 2007, all trains and launchers were scrapped. There are two museum exhibits left that are completely demilitarized.

This is how the life of the strategic “Well done” ended.

However, in April 2013, Deputy Defense Minister Yuri Borisov said that the Moscow Institute of Thermal Engineering was starting development work on a new generation of railway missile systems.

In 2014, the command of the Strategic Missile Forces, as reported in the media, publicly confirmed that the BZHRK would be revived.

And finally, at the end of last year it was announced that successful throw tests of the intercontinental ballistic missile for the Russian BZHRK "Barguzin". The launch was carried out by a weight and size model of the Yars rocket, adapted to the railway complex.

And at the end of 2017, it turned out that “Barguzin” was going into long-term storage on sidings, without ever becoming a full-fledged combat railway complex. Although this has not yet been officially announced. And it’s most likely a matter of finances—there’s not enough for everything right now.

This is what the head of armament of the Armed Forces from 1994 to 2000, retired Colonel General Anatoly Sitnov, says about this. It was he who was directly related to the preservation of the country’s defense power in the troubled nineties. With his participation, the Iskander, Topol-M and missile systems were created. It is difficult to find a more authoritative specialist.

According to A.P. Sitnov, Russia today has sufficient nuclear missile power to inflict a crushing retaliatory blow on any aggressor. Moreover, strategic nuclear forces have been significantly updated in recent years. The Navy is commissioning a new generation of missile submarines equipped with Bulava missiles. The Strategic Missile Forces have replaced the outdated Topolis with the newest ones and are putting even more modern Yars on combat duty. The Air Force is testing strategic-range cruise missiles. Therefore, it is simply unreasonable to start creating another very expensive nuclear missile system now.

Nevertheless, Sitnov noted, development work on Barguzin has been carried out. The experiment with a throw launch was successful. If urgently needed, our rocket train will quickly be brought to working condition and put on the rails.

In Russia, a new nuclear weapon is preparing for the final stage of testing - the Barguzin combat railway missile system (BZHRK), created on the basis of its predecessor, the Molodets BZHRK (SS-24 Scalpel), which was on combat duty from 1987 to 2005 and was withdrawn from service by agreement with the United States in 1993. What forced Russia to return to the creation of these weapons again? When once again in 2012 the Americans confirmed the deployment of their missile defense facilities in Europe, Russian President Vladimir Putin quite harshly formulated Russia’s response to this. He officially stated that the creation of an American missile defense system actually “nullifies our nuclear missile potential,” and announced that our answer would be “the development of strike nuclear missile systems.” One of such complexes was the Barguzin BZHRK, which the American military especially did not like , causing them serious concern, since its adoption makes the presence of a US missile defense system as such practically useless. Predecessor of "Bargruzin" "Well done" The BZHRK was already in service with the Strategic Missile Forces until 2005. Its main developer in the USSR was the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau (Ukraine). The only manufacturer rockets - Pavlograd Mechanical Plant. Tests of the BZHRK with the RT-23UTTKh "Molodets" missile (according to NATO classification - SS-24 Scalpel) in the railway version began in February 1985 and were completed by 1987. BZHRKs looked like ordinary railway trains made of refrigerated, mail-baggage and even passenger cars. Inside each train there were three launchers with Molodets solid propellant missiles, as well as the entire support system for them with a command post and combat crews. The first BZHRK was put on combat duty in 1987 in Kostroma. In 1988, five regiments were deployed (a total of 15 launchers), and by 1991, three missile divisions: near Kostroma, Perm and Krasnoyarsk - each consisted of four missile regiments (a total of 12 BZHRK trains). Each train consisted of several cars . One carriage is a command post, the other three – with an opening roof – are launchers with missiles. Moreover, the missiles could be launched both from planned stops and from any point along the route. To do this, the train was stopped, a special device was used to move the contact suspension of electrical wires to the sides, the launch container was placed in a vertical position, and the rocket was launched.
The complexes stood at a distance of about four kilometers from each other in permanent shelters. Within a radius of 1,500 kilometers from their bases, together with railway workers, work was carried out to strengthen the track: heavier rails were laid, wooden sleepers were replaced with reinforced concrete ones, embankments were filled with denser crushed stone. power only to professionals (launch modules with a rocket had eight wheel pairs, the rest of the support cars had four pairs each). The train could cover about 1,200 kilometers in one day. Its combat patrol time was 21 days (thanks to the reserves on board, it could operate autonomously for up to 28 days). Great importance was attached to the BZHRK, even the officers who served on these trains had ranks higher than their colleagues in similar positions in the mine complexes.
Soviet BZHRK– shock for Washington The rocket scientists tell either a legend or a true story that the Americans themselves allegedly pushed our designers to create the BZHRK. They say that one day our intelligence received information that the United States was working on creating a railway complex that would be able to move through underground tunnels and, if necessary, emerge from the ground at certain points in order to launch a strategic missile unexpectedly for the enemy. Photographs were even attached to the intelligence officers’ report this train. Apparently, these data made a strong impression on the Soviet leadership, since it was immediately decided to create something similar. But our engineers approached this issue more creatively. They decided: why drive trains underground? You can use them as usual railways, disguised as freight trains. It will be simpler, cheaper and more effective. Later, however, it turned out that the Americans conducted special studies that showed that in their conditions, BZHRKs would not be effective enough. They simply slipped misinformation to us in order to once again shake up the Soviet budget, forcing us, as it seemed to them then, into useless spending, and the photo was taken from a small full-scale model.
But by the time all this became clear, it was too late for Soviet engineers to work back. They, and not only in the drawings, have already created a new nuclear weapon with an individually targeted missile, a range of ten thousand kilometers with ten warheads with a capacity of 0.43 Mt and a serious set of means to overcome missile defense. In Washington, this news caused a real shock. Still would! How do you determine which of the “freight trains” to destroy in the event of a nuclear strike? If you shoot at everyone at once, there won’t be enough nuclear warheads. Therefore, in order to track the movement of these trains, which easily escaped the field of view of tracking systems, the Americans had to almost constantly keep a constellation of 18 spy satellites over Russia, which was very costly for them. Especially considering that the US intelligence services never managed to identify the BZHRK along the patrol route. Therefore, as soon as the political situation allowed in the early 90s, the US immediately tried to get rid of this headache. At first, they persuaded the Russian authorities not to allow the BZHRKs to travel around the country, but to remain laid up. This allowed them to constantly keep only three or four spy satellites over Russia instead of 16–18. And then they persuaded our politicians to completely destroy the BZHRK. They officially agreed under the pretext of the alleged “expiration of the warranty period for their operation.”
How to cut "Scalpels" The last combat train was sent for melting down in 2005. Eyewitnesses said that when, in the twilight of the night, the wheels of the cars clattered on the rails and the nuclear “ghost train” with Scalpel missiles set off on its final journey, even the strongest men could not stand it: tears rolled from the eyes of both gray-haired designers and rocket officers . They said goodbye to a unique weapon, in many combat characteristics superior to everything that was available and even planned to be put into service in the near future. Everyone understood that this unique weapon in the mid-90s became hostage to the political agreements of the country's leadership with Washington. And not selfish. Apparently, therefore, each new stage of the destruction of the BZHRK strangely coincided with the next tranche of a loan from the International Monetary Fund. The refusal of the BZHRK had a number of objective reasons. In particular, when Moscow and Kyiv “fled up” in 1991, this immediately hit Russian nuclear power hard. Almost all of our nuclear missiles during the Soviet era were made in Ukraine under the leadership of academicians Yangel and Utkin. Of the 20 types then in service, 12 were designed in Dnepropetrovsk, at the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau, and produced there, at the Yuzhmash plant. BZHRK was also made in the Ukrainian Pavlograd.
But each time it became more and more difficult to negotiate with the developers from Nezalezhnaya to extend their service life or modernize them. As a result of all these circumstances, our generals had to report with a sour face to the country’s leadership how “in accordance with the planned reduction of the Strategic Missile Forces, another BZHRK has been removed from combat duty.” But what to do: the politicians promised - the military was forced to fulfill it. At the same time, they understood perfectly well: if we cut and remove missiles from combat duty due to old age at the same pace as in the late 90s, then in just five years, instead of the existing 150 Voyevods, we will not have any of these heavy missiles left. And then no light Topols will make any difference - and at that time there were only about 40 of them. For the American missile defense system, this is nothing. For this reason, as soon as Yeltsin vacated the Kremlin office, a number of people from the country’s military leadership, at the request of the rocket scientists, began to prove to the new president the need to create a nuclear complex similar to the BZHRK. And when it became finally clear that the United States was not going to abandon its plans to create its own missile defense system under any circumstances, work on the creation of this complex really began. And now, in the very near future, the States will again receive their previous headache, now in the form of a new BZHRK generation called "Barguzin". Moreover, as the rocket scientists say, these will be ultra-modern rockets in which all the shortcomings of the Scalpel have been eliminated.
"Barguzin"– the main trump card against US missile defense The main disadvantage noted by opponents of the BZHRK was the accelerated wear and tear of the railway tracks along which it moved. They had to be repaired frequently, over which the military and railway workers had eternal disputes. The reason for this was the heavy missiles - weighing 105 tons. They did not fit in one car - they had to be placed in two, strengthening the wheel pairs on them. Today, when issues of profit and commerce have come to the fore, Russian Railways are certainly not ready, as it was before, to infringe on their interests for the sake of the country's defense, and also bear the costs of repairing the roadway in the event that a decision is made that BZHRKs should again operate on their roads. It was the commercial reason, according to some experts, that today could become an obstacle to the final decision to adopt them into service. However, this problem has now been removed. The fact is that the new BZHRKs will no longer have heavy missiles. The complexes are armed with lighter RS-24 missiles, which are used in the Yars complexes, and therefore the weight of the car is comparable to the usual one, which makes it possible to achieve ideal camouflage of the combat personnel. However, the RS-24s have only four warheads, and older missiles had them ten. But here we must take into account that the Barguzin itself does not carry three missiles, as it was before, but twice as many. This, of course, is the same - 24 versus 30. But we should not forget that Yars are practically the most modern development and their probability of overcoming missile defense is much higher than that of their predecessors. The navigation system has also been updated: now there is no need to set target coordinates in advance, everything can be changed quickly.
In a day, such a mobile complex can cover up to 1,000 kilometers, plying along any railway lines in the country, indistinguishable from a regular train with refrigerated cars. Autonomy time is a month. There is no doubt that the new group of BZHRK will be a much more effective response to the US missile defense system than even the deployment of our Iskander operational-tactical missiles near the borders of Europe, which are so feared in the West. There is also no doubt that the Americans are interested in the idea of ​​BZHRK obviously will not like it (although theoretically their creation will not violate the latest Russian-American agreements). BZHRK at one time formed the basis of the retaliatory strike force in the Strategic Missile Forces, since they had increased survivability and were very likely to survive after the enemy delivered the first strike. The United States feared it no less than the legendary “Satan,” since the BZHRK was a real factor in inevitable retribution. Until 2020, it is planned to put into service five regiments of the Barguzin BZHRK—that’s 120 warheads, respectively. Apparently, the BZHRK will become the strongest argument, in fact, our main trump card in the dispute with the Americans regarding the advisability of deploying a global missile defense system.