BRYANSK. Nov 14 (Interfax-AVN) - The central repair plant of the Strategic Missile Forces (SMF) in Bryansk will start to dispose of this year's last railway-based missile launcher on Monday, a plant spokesman told Interfax-Military News Agency.
"It is this year's ninth railway-based missile launcher. Its cannibalization is to be over before the end of the week," the spokesman said.
The cannibalization process is observed by a U.S. inspection team in accordance with the START-1 treaty, he said.
Colonel General Nikolai Solovtsov, SMF commander-in-chief, told Interfax-AVN earlier that railroad-based missile systems have been taken out of the inventories of the Strategic Missile Forces entirely.
"It is impossible to extend the service life of a weapon system all the time. Therefore, we have to say good bye to the railroad missile systems," he said.
On August 12, 2005, the last train carrying the ballistic missile launchers was decommissioned in the Kostroma strategic missile division and sent to the storage base in the Perm region. The launchers of the system are now being scrapped at the SMF Bryansk repair plant, while the missiles at the plant in Perm.
According to Solovtsov, the systems were taken out of service because their service lives had expired. "It is inadmissible to keep the weapons with expired service lives in the inventory. One cannot joke with nuclear weapons, because it may cause quite some troubles," he said.
He pointed out that the fact that the systems were developed and manufactured in Ukraine is also important. "There are no factories now that used to develop and manufacture the systems," he said.
He recalled that in the early 1990s, USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev unilaterally declared that railroad missile systems would not be sent on duty routes around the country any longer.
The systems never left bases after 1993, which was mostly explained by the difficult social and economic situation in the country.
Solovtsov added that the decommissioning of railroad missile systems would be made up for by the fielding of new Topol-M silo-based and mobile strategic missile systems. "The Strategic Missile Forces are being developed now with due account of the requirement to have balanced number of strike, command and control and supporting assets," he said.