Russia's Sarmat Carries 16 Warheads, Can Destroy Texas: Defense Sector Impact

Russia test-launched its RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile this week. President Vladimir Putin called the test an “unconditional success” and said the missile would enter combat service by the end of the year. The event resets the nuclear deterrence calculus and forces a reassessment of defense-sector exposure. The immediate, fear-driven take is that a nuclear exchange is closer than ever. That reading sells newsletters. The practical market read is different: the Sarmat test makes visible a capability gap that Washington has been slow to address, and that gap will drive procurement budgets for years.

Sarmat’s 16-Warhead Payload Redefines Deterrence Math

The Sarmat is not an incremental upgrade. It is a clean-sheet design built to defeat US missile defenses. The missile’s specifications, as reported by the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance and Russian state media, reset the baseline for what an ICBM can deliver.

Range and Destructive Footprint

• Maximum range: over 21,000 miles (Putin claims 35,000 km), enough to reach any point on Earth from Russian silos.
• Speed: approximately 15,500 mph at terminal phase.
• Height: 116 feet, roughly a four-story building.
• Payload: up to 10 metric tons.
• Warheads: up to 16 independently targetable reentry vehicles, each capable of destroying a major city.
• Area effect: a single Sarmat can release warheads across a footprint the size of Texas or France, according to Newsweek’s reporting on the missile’s payload.

Why Texas Is the Benchmark

The Texas-sized area is not just a scare figure. It quantifies the dispersal of multiple warheads across a wide geographic footprint, making midcourse interception effectively impossible. Each warhead follows an independent trajectory, and the missile carries a suite of countermeasures–decoys, chaff, and potentially hypersonic boost-glide vehicles–designed to confuse and overwhelm ground-based interceptors. The physics of defending against such a raid are unforgiving. A study by 13 physicists and engineers with the American Physical Society concluded that US anti-missile defenses are so limited they could not stop “a relative handful of old-fashioned North Korean ICBMs” from reaching their targets.

“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.”

The Sarmat is orders of magnitude more capable than those North Korean systems. The practical implication: the US homeland is effectively undefended against this missile, and that reality will shape budget priorities for the next decade.

US Minuteman ICBMs vs. Sarmat: A Capability Gap

The US land-based leg of the nuclear triad still relies on Minuteman III missiles that first entered service in the 1960s and 1970s. These are liquid-fueled, silo-based systems with limited throw-weight and no meaningful penetration aids against modern air defenses. Russia, meanwhile, has spent two decades modernizing its strategic arsenal under Putin, deploying hundreds of new land-based missiles, commissioning new nuclear submarines, and upgrading bombers.

The next-generation US ICBM, the LGM-35 Sentinel, is scheduled to enter combat service in the early 2030s. That leaves a multi-year window where the US land-based deterrent is qualitatively inferior. The Sarmat test makes that window impossible to ignore. Congress will face pressure to accelerate Sentinel funding and to invest in a new layer of homeland missile defense–something the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system was never designed to handle against a saturation attack with advanced countermeasures.

Defense Sector Exposure: Who Benefits from Missile Defense Urgency

The Sarmat test does not immediately change any defense contractor’s backlog. It changes the political environment in which future budgets are written. The contractors with exposure to strategic missile systems, missile defense, and hypersonic weapons will be in focus as the Pentagon reassesses its requirements.

Strategic Missile Modernization

The Sentinel program is the direct US response to the ICBM gap. It is a multi-billion-dollar effort to replace the Minuteman fleet. Any acceleration of that program flows to the prime contractor and its supply chain. The test also strengthens the case for the Next Generation Interceptor program, designed to upgrade the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system, and for space-based sensor layers that can track hypersonic threats.