Any thoughts about that last explanation? Is it credible that a successful military technology would have been abandoned because it was too effective? I find it hard to believe that the Soviets would have shown such restraint.

The Soviets’ inheritors have not shown such restraint.

Then again, things are different. Their nuke subs are tied up at the pier, ours are on patrol. We have a credible if limited NMD system that is enough to impress them, if not enough to impress our own Democrats. Our nuclear deterrent is slightly diminished in number compared to the Cold War era, but likely no less in effectiveness. I think even they wonder about their own systems, which is why the keep trying to find a modern SLBM that works, and keep announcing things like their maneuverable RVs.

If the SM-3 was packing an EMP-capable nuke for terminal kill, then a maneuvering warhead matters less. We put our chips on hit-to-kill, but it strikes my non-engineer mind that something falling from a 700 mile apogee has a lot more KE available than something rising and near the top of its own apogee. A miss by a foot is still a miss.

I’m sure the US AMaRV was wicked good at what it did, and equally sure that the Russian AMaRV is a holdover from the Cold War that they dusted off to show potential allies that the Bear still has teeth. The difference is that we were going up against the Soviet ABM that did have big nasty nukes like our Sentinel ABMs, and surviving the EMP environment would have likely been a trick, hydraulics or no.

It might have been game-changing, and from a game theory standpoint it may have been a little too much for the other Prisoner to stand. The fact that the Russians have demonstrated an AMaRV is less of a big deal now, we’re not really playing that particular game anymore.