The North Korean authorities have announced that they have developed a nuclear torpedo comparable to the Russian Poseidon, and like it, capable of causing huge tsunamis. But these assertions are not very credible, as are, moreover, those concerning the Russian Poseidon.
On March 1, 2018, during a televised speech as part of the presidential election campaign, President Vladimir Putin publicly announced the upcoming arrival, within the Russian armed forces, of six new weapons that will bring the world, and Westerners in particular, to " listen to russia again“, in his words.
Beyond the hypersonic weapons Kinzhal and Avangard as well as the new ICBM RS-28 Sarmat, all now well known, the Russian president presented a "nuclear-powered" cruise missile, the 9M730 Burevestnik, an anti-aircraft defense system and spacecraft laser designated Perevest, as well as a weapon which, since its presentation, has given rise to numerous comments, the nuclear-powered heavy drone torpedo Status 6, subsequently designated in Russia by another name, the Poseidon torpedo, following a consultation which underlines its main dimension, namely getting people talking about it.
The public presentation of the Poseidon by Vladimir Putin was not, however, strictly speaking, a discovery in the West. Indeed, the program had been monitored for many years by Western intelligence services, the CIA then designating it under the code name Kanyon. Additionally, in 2015, the news site Rosskaijia gazeta, published an article about it, presenting a new nuclear-powered drone torpedo, giving it a range of more than 10.000 km and a top speed of 100 knots (180 km/h), allowing it to bypass enemy sonar defenses and strike a target.
This "leak of information", which many specialists consider intentional, then explained that the nuclear charge retained for the torpedo was more of a radiological weapon than a nuclear weapon due to the use of Cobalt-59, characterized by a Significantly greater and longer contamination, with a half-life of 5 years for Cobalt-60, than that resulting from other types of isotopes, such as gold or zinc.
In other words, the torpedo was presented as a weapon intended to contaminate a coastal area of several tens of square kilometers, or to penetrate adversary defenses to come, for example, to detonate a nuclear charge in a military port.
The notion of the creator of Tsunami was, in fact, totally absent from Russian communication, including during the public presentation of 2018. References to this possible capacity are, moreover, not to be sought in Russia, but in the West, and more precisely at the beginning of 2017 in British tabloids fond of this type of catchy title.
This speculation was then immediately dismissed by several specialists in the matter., arguing that not only would the power needed to generate a weak tsunami exceed 100 Megatons while the most powerful thermonuclear bomb ever built, the Soviet Tzar bomb of 1961, reached only 54 Mt, and especially that the use ofa dronized torpedo of this type did not bring any added value, quite the contrary, vis-à-vis more traditional strategic weapons, such as the ICBM and SLBM intercontinental missiles.
Even the hypothesis of the Cobalt-based radiological weapon, put forward by Russkajia Gazeta, was cut to pieces, while the vast majority of the isotopes released in such a hypothesis would disperse into the ocean and not on the coast. Unfortunately, the hypothesis of the torpedo capable of generating super-tsunamis was far too appetizing for the Western press, which repeated this implausible hypothesis over and over again, to the point that a few months later, it was the turn of Russian propaganda to announce that the Poseidon was carrying a 100 Mt load capable of generating a wave of "several hundred meters".
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