Russian state television has issued a chilling warning that Moscow could wipe out Britain with a nuclear tsunami in retaliation for supporting Ukraine.
In his Sunday evening primetime show, the Channel One anchor Dmitry Kiselyov said a strike by Russia’s Poseidon nuclear underwater drone could turn Britain into a wasteland by drowning the country in a 500-metre tidal wave of radioactive seawater.
“The explosion of this thermonuclear torpedo by Britain’s coastline will cause a gigantic tsunami wave. Having passed over the British Isles, it will turn whatever might be left of them into a radioactive wasteland.”
The comments came in response to calls by Boris Johnson, the prime minister, and Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, to boost western military aid for Ukraine to help the country defend itself from Russia’s offensive, which began in February.
“It actually seems like they’re raving on the British Isles,” Kiselyov said. “Why threaten never-ending Russia with nuclear weapons when you’re on an island which, you know, is so small?
“The island is so small that just one Sarmat missile is enough to sink it once and for all,” Kiselyov added, standing beside a computer-generated graphic showing a nuclear missile travelling from Russia to Britain.
Russia announced last month that it had successfully tested the Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile — called “Satan 2” by western analysts — in the country’s north. President Putin said the missile, which can carry nuclear warheads, would make Russia’s foes “think twice” before threatening Moscow.
The precise specifications of the Poseidon warhead are not known. The American Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has calculated the tsunami wave from a 50-megatonne bomb, about 3,000 times the size of the one that hit Hiroshima. They estimated that at 100 miles away wave heights would range from 5 to 15 metres.
There was a time when Russian state television airing open threats of nuclear attack on the West would have come as a shock, but since Moscow launched its attack on Ukraine they have become commonplace.
Last week Channel One’s 60 Minutes programme displayed a graphic showing the amount of time it would take a Sarmat missile to reach London — 202 seconds.
“One Sarmat missile and the British Isles will be no more,” the leader of the nationalist Rodina party, Alexei Zhuravlyov, said in the segment.
State media has played a key role in justifying Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine to the Russian public, casting the war as an existential battle with the West and the supposed “Nazis” who run Ukraine.
Its rhetoric has continued to heat up as the military campaign has lagged behind the Kremlin’s expectations in the face of fierce Ukrainian resistance and massive western arms shipments to Kyiv.
The jailed Putin critic Alexei Navalny recently tweeted that the Russian state media’s role as a cheerleader for the war was fuelling increasingly bellicose thinking in the Kremlin.
“The endlessly squealing anchors and their ‘experts’ are revving up their fury and have long since surpassed the military in their aggressiveness,” Navalny wrote. “They demand a war to the bitter end, storming Kyiv, bombing Lviv. Even the prospect of a nuclear war does not scare them ... Propagandists create the kind of public opinion that no longer simply allows Putin to commit war crimes, but demands them of him.”
In recent weeks state television has increasingly painted the Ukraine offensive as not just as a war between Russia and Europe, but as a wider conflict between Russia and the entire world akin to a third world war — one that they claim would justify the use of nuclear weapons.
“And on the subject of us using nuclear weapons, let me remind you of the phrase used by our supreme commander-in-chief [Putin]: ‘Why do we need a world in which there’s no Russia?’” Vladimier Solovyov, a television host, said in a segment last week.
“So if anyone thinks we’re bluffing, they should pay attention to the behaviour of our supreme commander-in-chief. He never bluffs.”
