Russia Conducts Second Successful Sarmat ‘Satan-II’ ICBM Test After New START’s Collapse

Super-heavy missile demonstrations as political theatre echo Nikita Khrushchev’s October 1961 detonation of the 50 Mt ‘Tsar Bomba’ and the 1983 Soviet flight tests of the SS-18 Mod 5 amid the dying breath of SALT-II: in each case, a dramatic show of offensive capability followed or preceded the erosion of arms-control guard-rails. The 2026 Sarmat test signals the strategic system’s pendulum swinging back from negotiated ceilings (START I 1991, SORT 2002, New START 2010) toward unconstrained rivalry, accelerated by the U.S. 2002 ABM-Treaty withdrawal and Russia’s 2018 ‘exotic’ weapons announcements – a classic action-reaction cycle between offensive missiles and defensive shields stretching to the German V-2 vs Allied AAA paradigm of the 1940s. Over a 100-year horizon, whether Sarmat’s promised 10-ton MIRV load ever reaches the planned ‘first regiment’ matters less than the precedent: once verification regimes dissolve, technological momentum and domestic prestige tend to trump cost or strategic logic, feeding arms races that are far harder to reverse than to ignite.