(Reuters) – Russia plans to form a division of special-purpose submarines that will carry Poseidon nuclear-capable torpedoes as part of the country’s Pacific Fleet by the end of 2024 or first half of 2025, Russia’s TASS news agency reported on Monday.
Russia said in January that it had produced the first set of the Poseidon torpedoes, four years after President Vladimir Putin announced the fundamentally new type of strategic nuclear weapon, confirming it would have its own nuclear power supply.
In late March, Russia said that the coastal infrastructure for the submarines that would carry the Poseidon torpedoes will be finished on the Kamchatka Peninsula, where Russia’s Pacific Fleet’s ballistic nuclear missile submarine base is located.
“The decision to form a division of special-purpose nuclear submarines in Kamchatka has been made,” TASS cited an unidentified defence source as saying. “We are talking about December 2024 or the first half of 2025.”
There are few confirmed details about the Poseidon in the public domain, but military analysts say it is essentially a cross between a torpedo and a drone which can be launched from a nuclear submarine.
(Reporting by Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Stephen Coates)
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