(End of the American Dream)—The Russians have developed the most sophisticated nuclear missile in the history of the world by a very wide margin, and it is specifically designed to be used in a future nuclear war with the United States. The RS-28 Sarmat is an intercontinental ballistic missile that has a maximum speed of approximately 15,500 miles per hour. It is 116 feet tall, and that makes it roughly as tall as a ten story building. It can carry up to 10 metric tons of thermonuclear warheads, and those warheads can destroy an area the size of the state of Texas.
We have no defenses against the Sarmat, and so once it is launched we will get hit. It is an incredibly terrifying weapon, and many believe that it is only a matter of time before it actually gets used.
The Sarmat is the crown jewel of Vladimir Putin’s very long campaign to modernize Russia’s strategic nuclear arsenal…
Since coming to power in 2000, Putin has overseen efforts to upgrade the Soviet-built components of the Russian nuclear triad — deploying hundreds of new, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, commissioning new nuclear submarines and modernizing nuclear-capable bombers.
The United States doesn’t have anything like the Sarmat.
Neither does anyone else.
It has a maximum range of more than 21,000 miles, and it can carry up to 16 independently targetable nuclear warheads…
The Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile has an expected range over 10,000 kilometers (6,200 miles) and can reportedly carry up to 16 independently targeted nuclear warheads, according to the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, a US-based nonprofit. Putin claims the range extends to more than 35,000 kilometers (21,750 miles).
Let me try to put this into language that anyone can understand.
This missile has enough range to reach any target on the entire planet.
So there is nowhere that is out of reach.
A single Sarmat can release 16 independently-targetable nuclear warheads.
That means that one missile goes up, and 16 warheads come down.
And each one of those warheads can instantly destroy an entire major city.
Russia plans to eventually produce more than 40 of these ICBMs.
According to Newsweek, a single Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile can carry enough nuclear warheads to wipe out “an area the size of Texas”…
The RS-28 Sarmat will reportedly carry a nuclear payload large enough to wipe out an area the size of Texas or France.
The Sarmat is the most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile in the entire world by a wide margin, and we have no way to defend against them.
In fact, a study that was conducted by a team of 13 physicists and engineers with the American Physical Society determined that our anti-missile defenses are so feeble that we couldn’t even do much “to stop a relative handful of old-fashioned North Korean ICBMs” from reaching their targets.
But just in case we are able to improve them in the future, the Russians have equipped the Sarmat with “a host of capabilities intended to defeat ballistic missile defenses”…
The Sarmat is a silo-launched, liquid-fueled, nuclear-armed ICBM. The missile will reportedly have a host of capabilities intended to defeat ballistic missile defenses, ranging from decoys and other countermeasures to a fractional orbital bombardment capability, and independent post-boost vehicles (IPBV). There have even been suggestions that it could carry a payload of multiple hypersonic boost-glide vehicles.
If Vladimir Putin decides to push the button, we are toast.
Of course most people in the western world assume that Putin would never do that because our retaliatory strikes would destroy the Russians.
But the truth is that so much has changed over the past couple of decades.
The Russians now have the most sophisticated anti-missile systems in the world by a very wide margin, and we are still relying on extremely outdated Minuteman ICBMs that first went into service in the 1960s and 1970s.
If we launched our extremely outdated ICBMs at the Russians, are you sure that they would get through?
The balance of power has shifted dramatically, and most people in the western world have no idea.
Earlier this week, the Russians conducted a test launch of the Sarmat that Putin called an “unconditional success”…
The test-launch from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the Arkhangelsk region took place at 11:15 a.m. Moscow time today, according to the Kremlin. Around half an hour later, Russian officials said that the missile hit its target at the Kura test range on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East.
The commander of the Strategic Rocket Forces, Sergei Karakayev, informed Putin of the successful test. The Russian leader monitored the launch via video link from his office bunker.
Putin called the test a “major event and unconditional success.”
This should have received a lot more attention from the media in the western world, because it is a huge story.
According to Putin, Sarmat missiles will start entering combat service by the end of this calendar year…
Putin said that the nuclear-armed Sarmat missile would enter combat service at the end of the year. It was built to replace the aging Soviet-built Voyevoda.
“This is the most powerful missile in the world,” Putin declared, adding that the combined power of the Sarmat’s individually targeted warheads is more than four times higher than that of any Western counterpart.
In contrast, the next-generation U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile, the LGM-35 Sentinel, is scheduled to enter combat service in the early 2030s.
In other words, we are way behind.
The Russians are also in the “final stages” of development for two other exceedingly fearsome weapons…
Putin also announced Russia was in the “final stages” of the development of the nuclear-armed Poseidon underwater drone and the Burevestnik cruise missile powered by miniature atomic reactors.
The Poseidon is designed to explode near enemy coastlines and cause a radioactive tsunami. The Burevestnik has virtually unlimited range thanks to nuclear propulsion, allowing it to loiter for days, circling air defenses and attacking from an unexpected direction.
In the future, a Poseidon drone armed with a nuclear weapon could be lurking just off the east coast and we would never even know it.
Once it explodes, a gigantic wall of radioactive water could come sweeping over Washington D.C. or New York City in just moments.
The Russians have been feverishly preparing for the wars of the future.
Meanwhile, our leaders have been focused on other things.
So let’s hope that a shooting war between the United States and Russia does not erupt any time soon, because it would not go very well for us.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
