R-36 Missile

The R-36 is a family of Soviet, and later Russian, intercontinental ballistic missiles designed by Mikhail Yangel's Yuzhnoye design bureau and built at the Yuzhny Machine-Building Plant in Ukraine, with the original version entering service in 1966 under the NATO reporting name SS-9 Scarp and a heavily upgraded later version, the R-36M and R-36M2 Voevoda, known in the West as the SS-18 Satan. Among the largest and heaviest ballistic missiles ever built, the modern R-36M2 carries up to ten independently targetable nuclear warheads along with decoys intended to defeat missile defenses, giving Russia's strategic forces one of their most powerful single weapons for total destructive capacity per missile. A shrinking number of R-36M2s, around 46 as of 2020, remained in Russian service into the 2020s at two missile fields, pending replacement by the newer RS-28 Sarmat.