Opinion | Putin’s Fancy Weapons? Everything Old Is New Again

After that war the Soviets acquired some of Hitler’s V-1s and V-2s and they were developed further by a bureau headed by Vladimir Chelomey. Mr. Chelomey wasn’t quite successful as a designer until he employed an engineer, Sergei Khrushchev — a capable engineer, but what is more important, the son of the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev. This gave Mr. Chelomey unlimited access to resources and resulted in the creation of some genuinely outstanding pieces of military technology.

Soviet supersonic KUB surface-to-air missiles played an enormous part in the initial stages of the 1973 Israeli-Arab war, and the Onyx supersonic antiship missile was a genuine marvel. At the final stage of its flight it skimmed the water at 40 to 50 feet, far higher than its American counterpart but still enough to avoid detection.

Despite all these successes, the Soviet Union never went for a hypersonic ship killer. The reason was simple. Because of the extreme heat generated by hypersonic flight, the missile wouldn’t be able to fly lower than 25 miles up, making it a sitting duck for interceptor missiles.

It’s true that such a missile is fast, but remember that it’s a scramjet, with huge, big, nasty air intakes, on which it depends to keep aloft. Any deviation from its course, especially at low altitudes, can wreak havoc with the airflow. In other words, it’s not maneuverable at any altitude, and is especially in danger of crashing if flying low.

The Soviet Union chose not to manufacture supersonic ship killers not because manufacturing them was impossible, but because they would be useless. They’re great stuff for a computer game. Not so great for real-world engineering.

So this brings us back to our main topic. Almost all military hardware Mr. Putin is boasting about harks back to Soviet times. When the projects proved to be dead ends, the products were rejected even by the Soviet military — not because they were too advanced to create, but because they were not functional.

The Soviet war chest was full of monstrous projects that were always top secret, whether they were feasible or not. That’s what Mr. Putin is capitalizing on — and what his generals are feeding him. Sometimes they just exaggerate, as with the S-400. But as often as not they take top secret Soviet failures and try to rehash them as public relations successes.

Yulia Latynina is a Russian journalist with Echo of Moscow, a commercial radio station, and Novaya Gazeta, an independent Russian newspaper.

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