MOSCOW. May 5 (Interfax-AVN) - The Combat Railway Missile Complex (CRMC) will take a lot of time to develop, says Yury Solomonov, the general design engineer of missile systems, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a Hero of Russia.
"Such a complex is being developed, but it will not be completed very soon," he told the graduates of several Moscow schools ahead of the Victory Day.
The CRMC is an intercontinental-class system, he said. It does not fall under the restrictions imposed by the U.S.-Russian strategic arms treaties. "Each side is free to either develop it or not," he said.
He would not say when such a Complex could enter service in Strategic Missile Troops.
Earlier Russian Deputy Defense Minister Yury Borisov said that the creation of the CRMC will be completed under the current state armament program that runs until 2020.
"It will be realized in the framework of the current state armament program," Borisov said.
A sketch design of the CRMC is complete, he said. "Everything goes to plan. There are no technical difficulties, he said
A source in the defense industry told Interfax-AVN earlier that "the CRMC 'Barguzin' will enter service in one of missile divisions consisting of up to five missile regiments."
The new "nuclear train" will be no different from an ordinary rolling stock, he said.
The previous-general CRMC, which was created in the USSR in 1980s and entered service in 1987, used railcars with reinforced wheelsets to disguise intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) because of their heavy weight (130 tonnes together with the transport launch container).
The Soviet Strategic Missile Troops had three divisions with the Molodets CRMCs (Scalpel in NATO classification) that were stationed in the Kostroma region and with the Perm and Krasnoyarsk regiments - in all, 12 "nuclear trains," with three missiles in each one of them. Each missile carried ten warheads. The CRMC was scrapped in 2003-2005 without service extension. One reason was the fact that the designer, RT-23 UTTKh Design Bureau Yuzhnoye, is based in Ukraine.