BEIJING, April 26 (RIA Novosti) - The test launch of a ballistic missile equipped with new warheads has shown that Russia can be confident of its own security until at least 2030, the defense minister said Wednesday.
"The latest test [launch] conducted several days ago allows us to say that Russia's absolute security will be ensured until 2030-2035 regardless of the global military-political situation," Sergei Ivanov told a new conference after a meeting with defense ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Beijing.
The test launch was conducted on April 22 from the Kapustin Yar site in southern Russia, and a dummy warhead hit the target area located 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) away at the Balkhash site in Kazakhstan with a deviation of only a few hundred meters.
A leading missile designer earlier said that Russia's sea- and land-based missile groups would be re-equipped by 2015 and the Strategic Missile Forces would have 2,000 warheads by 2020.
Russia has five missile regiments equipped with silo-based Topol-M (SS-27) ballistic missiles and the first regiment equipped with mobile Topol-M systems will be put on combat duty in 2006.
Bulava missiles, a sea-based version of the Topol-M, could be deployed on Borey-class nuclear submarines as early as in 2008, the designer said.
Last year, Russia conducted two successful test launches of the Bulava. The first in-flight test launch was conducted on September 27, 2005 from the Dmitry Donskoi, a Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarine.
On December 21, 2005 another Bulava was launched from the Dmitry Donskoi in the White Sea before traveling thousands of miles to hit a dummy target on the Kura test site on the Kamchatka Peninsula. It was the first time a Bulava had been launched from a submerged position.
Ivanov said both land and sea-based ballistic missiles would be equipped with either a single warhead or MIRV (multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicle) and deployed by the Strategic Missile Forces and the Navy.
