Elusive Avengers
Thirty years ago, the Utkin brothers created battle railroad missile systems (BZHRK) - “launch sites on wheels”, which, by their elusiveness and combat power, terrified the United States. The Americans did their best to destroy them. However, the Russians did not surrender, and in a few years a new generation of BZHRK will be released on the open spaces of our country - Barguzin missile systems
В stories the confrontation between the Soviet / Russian and American military engineering schools is one page that still evokes a feeling of the deepest respect for domestic engineers and the deepest shock of the actions of 90 politicians of the last century. It is about the creation in the Soviet Union of combat railway missile systems (BZHRK) - the most powerful weaponswhich has never been created equal in any country of the world.
Attempts to adapt the railway platforms under the launch sites for the missiles were made even by the engineers of Nazi Germany. In the Soviet Union at the end of 50, these works were carried out in OKB-301 under the direction of Semyon Lavochkin (cruise missile "Storm") and OKB-586 under the leadership of Mikhail Yangel (creating a specialized train for basing a ballistic missile of medium range P-12). However, true success in this direction was achieved only by the Utkin brothers — General Designer of Yuzhnoye Design Bureau, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Vladimir Fedorovich Utkin (Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine) and General Designer of Design Bureau of Special Engineering (St. Petersburg, Russia) Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexei Fedorovich Utkin. Under the leadership of the elder brother, an intercontinental ballistic missile RT-23 and its railway version RT-XNUMHUTTH (23IX15, "Scalpel" according to NATO classification) were created, and under the direction of the younger brother, the "spaceport on wheels" capable of carrying three "Scalpel »And launch them from anywhere in the Soviet Union, with which there is a railway connection.
The success of the Utkin brothers in the creation of BZHRK, obviously, is due to at least two reasons. The first - by the 70 years of the last century in the USSR, a clear and fully reflecting objective reality concept of using combat railway missile systems was formed. The Soviet BZHRK was a “retaliation weapon”, which was supposed to be used after a probable opponent launched a massive nuclear strike on the territory of the USSR. The country's extensive railway network made it possible to hide rocket trains anywhere. Therefore, having appeared, practically, out of nowhere, 12 of Soviet BZHRK carrying 36 intercontinental ballistic missiles (each of which carried atomic 10 separable charges), in response to a nuclear strike could literally wipe out any European country that is part of in NATO, or several large US states. The second reason for the appearance of BZHRK is the very high potential of Soviet military designers and engineers, and the availability of the necessary technologies for the mass production of such products. “The task that the Soviet government has set for us was striking in its grandeur. In domestic and world practice, no one has ever encountered so many problems. We had to place an intercontinental ballistic missile in a railroad car, but a missile with a launcher weighs more than 150 tons. How to do it? After all, the train with such a huge load should go on the national routes of the Ministry of Railways. How to transport a strategic nuclear-guided missile in general, how to ensure absolute safety on the way, because we were given the estimated speed of the train up to 120 km / h. Will the bridges withstand, will the canvas collapse, and the launch itself, how to transfer the load on the railroad tracks when launching the rocket, will the train stand on the rails during the launch, how to lift the rocket into a vertical position as quickly as possible after the train stops? ” General Designer of the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau Vladimir Fedorovich Utkin, who tormented him at that moment in his questions.
All these problems were successfully solved and twelve Soviet rocket trains became a toothache for Americans. The extensive railway network of the USSR (each train could move 1 thousand km per day), the presence of numerous natural and artificial shelters did not allow determining their location with a sufficient degree of confidence, including using satellites.
Nothing like the American engineers and the military to create and could not, although they tried. A prototype of the US BZHRK before 1992, was tested at the US railway test site and the Western missile test site (Vandenberg Air Force Base, California). It consisted of two standard locomotives, two launch vehicles with ICBM “MX”, a command post, support system wagons and personnel wagons. At the same time, the Americans did not succeed in creating effective mechanisms for lowering the contact network and removing the rocket during its launch away from the train and railway tracks, so the launch of missiles by American BZhRK was assumed from specially equipped launch sites, which, of course, significantly reduced the factor of stealth and surprise. In addition, unlike the USSR, the rail network in the United States is less developed, and railways are owned by private companies. And this created many problems, ranging from the fact that civilian personnel would have to be involved in controlling the locomotives of the rocket trains, ending problems with creating a system for centralized control of combat patrols of the BZhRK and the organization of their technical operation.
As a result, first, at the insistence of Great Britain, from 1992, Russia put its BZHRK “at a joke” - to the places of permanent deployment, then - in 1993, it undertook, according to the START-2 agreement, to destroy all the RT-10UTX missiles during 23 years . And although this agreement, in fact, has not entered into legal force, in 2003-2005, all Russian BZHRKs were removed from combat duty and disposed of. The appearance of two of them can now be seen only in the museum of railway equipment at the Warsaw station of St. Petersburg and in the AvtoVAZ Technical Museum.
Reference: The first BZHRK 15P961 "Well done" with the intercontinental ballistic missile 15Х61 (РТ-23 УТТХ, SS-24 "Ссалрел") was adopted in the Soviet Union in 1987 year. By 1992, three rocket divisions armed with BZHRK were deployed in our country: 10-rocket division in the Kostroma region, 52-rocket division deployed in ZATO Star (Perm Territory), 36-I rocket division, KTO, ). In each of the divisions there were four missile regiments (a total of 12 BZHRK trains, three launchers in each).
Well done "with the mind looked like a regular train of several refrigerated and passenger cars. This structure consisted of three three-car launch modules with RTB-23UTTH ICBMs, a command module consisting of 7 railcars, a tank-car with reserves of fuel and lubricants and three diesel locomotives DM-62. The train and the launcher were developed on the basis of a four-car eight-axle wagon with a carrying capacity of 135 tons by KBSM. The minimum launcher module included three cars: the launcher control station, the launcher and the support unit. Each of the three launchers included in the BZHRK could launch as part of a train or autonomously. When moving along the country's railway network, the BZhRK made it possible to quickly change the location of the launch site up to 1000 kilometers per day. At the same time, it was possible to identify the train as BZHRK only by the presence of a third locomotive as part of it, or by drawing attention to ground-based refrigeration cars with eight wheeled pairs (a regular freight car has four wheeled pairs). Even reducing the mass of the missile at 1.5 tons compared with the mine option and load distribution of the launcher along the eight axes of the car did not allow the designers to fully fit into the permissible axial load on the path. To solve this problem, special “unloading” devices were used in the BZHRK, redistributing part of the weight of the car with the launcher to the neighboring cars. To ensure the autonomous operation of the starting module, as well as devices for shorting and discharging the contact network, the starting modules were equipped with four diesel generators with a power of 100 kW. The autonomy of the rocket train operation was 28 days.
The RT-23UTTH rocket itself had a head part of a separable type of individual targeting with ten warheads with a power of 0.43Мт and a complex of means for overcoming missile defense. Firing range - 10100 km. The length of the rocket 23 m. The launch weight of the rocket 104,8 t. The mass of the rocket with the launch container 126 tons. Having received an order to launch rockets, the train stopped at any point on its route.
With a special device, the contact suspension was set aside, the roof of one of the refrigerated cars was opened, from where a launch canister with a rocket was raised to a vertical position. After this was carried out mortar missile launch. Coming out of the container, the rocket was deflected away from the train with the help of a powder accelerator and only after that the cruise engine was launched on it.
And this technology made it possible to divert the rocket propulsion engine from the launch complex and thereby ensure the stability of the rocket train, the safety of people and engineering structures, including the railway ones. From the moment of receiving the launch order to the launch of the rocket, no more than 3 minutes passed.
The Soviet BZHRK were officially removed from combat duty in May 2005. However, over the past 10 years, the potential threat to our country has not diminished. She just transformed. The current US administration is professing a strategy of "global disarming strike", according to which a massive non-nuclear strike can suddenly be brought down to the territory of a potential enemy. “That rearmament program, primarily of sea-based weapons, which the United States is conducting, allows them to reach the total amount of possible delivery of important 2015-2016 thousands of cruise missiles to the important facilities of the Russian Federation during the 6,5-7 period, with about 5 thousand sea carriers, ”Pavel Sozinov, general designer of the Almaz-Antey Air Defense Group, told reporters at the end of last year.
To keep this “winged swarm” from attack is possible only if the United States knows that it will precisely and guaranteed receive a retaliatory strike. Therefore, work began on 2012 in Russia to create a new generation of combat railroad missile systems. Development work on this topic is led by the main creator of Russian ICBMs, the Moscow Institute of Thermal Engineering (MIT). In contrast to the “Well done”, the “Barguzin” (the so-called new rocket train will be called) will be armed not with “Scalpels”, but with the “Yars” type rockets entirely Russian development and production. They are twice as light as the PT-23UTTH, although they do not contain 10, but 4 (according to open sources) of divided warheads. But fly a thousand kilometers further. The first rocket train should be commissioned in 2018 year.
Judging by the available information, the Barguzin in general - neither cars, nor diesel locomotives, nor electromagnetic radiation, will be distinguished from the total mass of freight trains, thousands of which are now scurrying daily on Russian railways. For example, the “Well done” was carrying three DM62 diesel locomotives (a special modification of the М62 serial diesel locomotive) with an aggregate power of 6 thousand lh.s. And the capacity of one of the current trunk two-section diesel locomotive 2ТЭ25А "Vityaz", which is serially produced by Transmashholding, is 6 800 hp. And the mass of “Yars” does not require additional reinforcement of either wagons or the railway tracks along which the train passes. Therefore, soon our country will once again have another weighty “argument” in talking about peace on our planet.
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