I mean reddit also called her out years ago when she was opposed to nuclear energy?

Sure but on the night this one was launched there wasn't much else launched.

Huh? Where are you getting this number from?

This missile wasn't just a nuclear-capable missile with a normal warhead. This missile had no warhead, unless you count a lump of concrete ballast as a warhead. That's what made this so weird, Russia either launched a Kh-55 as a kinetic missile (+ whatever fuel is left behind), which would be really pathetic if true. Or they launched it as a test for how an actual nuclear armed one might go.

Or what I think might be most likely, perhaps this was a training exercise for the pilot, and they thought "why not fire it at Ukraine anyway". Which is still dangerous because they still got the data.

Or it's a pathetic feint. Or I've also heard it suggested that perhaps it was a distraction attempt, only problem is they barely launched much of an attack on that night.

So I don't know where you're getting the 500-1000lbs of TNT from?

Edit: the actual warheads are:

Nuclear: 5 to 150 kilotonnes of TNT

Conventional: 1000lbs HE (nice guess), or a few cluster bomb variants

Again so the Kh-55 can take a conventional warhead. So why the hell was a dummy nuke launched?

I don't really buy that Russia has started using Kh-55 cruise missiles as just kinetic impact weapons. That's one hell of a waste of money to do relatively little damage. Yeah it'll still cause damage to whatever you hit, but it's going to be very very localised.

And have we seen anymore since then? I don't believe so.

This really seems like either a test, to see what the performance of the Kh-55 against Ukraine is like for a nuclear attack. Might be as a feint, or just training and decided to point it at Ukraine because why not (this is sadly the most hopeful), or worst of all because they might launch a nuclear attack soon.

I can't think of any other reasons. Some people have said by accident, but the Kh-55 is launched from a plane. Yeah ok I get that a pilot could accidentally launch it, but how do you accidentally load it? Training seems more likely given this, but that doesn't mean it also wasn't a test.

>We calculate launch angle/trajectory using sophisticated algorithms to determine their destination.

It's a cruise missile, so no you cannot tell, unless it's a very simple missile with very very simple programming.

The reason you literally cannot tell, is that it's ambiguous until a later point in its journey. Before that a cruise missile aimed at another target could also have taken the same path up to that point.

And as far as can we tell whether a Kh-55 has a nuclear warhead, or a concrete warhead? No we cannot. They look the same from the outside. They might have ever so slightly different slight characteristics, but per-missile flight characteristics are going to vary more than whether they have a warhead, so again no one knows except those who launched it (well I hope they know).

No. It looks the same from the outside. Will the difference in the inert concrete head vs nuclear warhead create slight differences in flight dynamics? Yes. Will it create some sort of difference that could be measured with any technology anyone on earth has? Extremely unlikely, especially since local weather, per missile build tolerances, per sensor tolerance, etc etc would all have a much bigger impact.

So I would go with a very simple no. No you cannot tell what's in it.

I would have agreed with you in the past. But now? It wouldn't surprise me if they secretly gutted all that in order to make some money, and the people in charge of the nuclear stockpile are way overworked, aren't supervised, and have forgot half of the information.

Regardless this is bad news no matter which way you look at it. People are saying it was a test of the response, well it doesn't matter what the reason they launched it was, they still got the data for the test, even if they didn't mean to do this.

The idea that they're using these as kinetic + fuel weapons doesn't make much sense to me.