P-700 Granit: The Ship Killer
Ships belonging to the Kirov and Kuznetsov classes are equipped with Granit AshMs. Those anti-ship missiles are gigantic: Each Granit comes at 10 meters in length and weighs 7 tons! The warhead alone weighs 750kg! The Granit has a cruising speed of between Mach 1.6 and Mach 2.5 and has a range of 625km. As is customary with most Russian cruise and AshM missiles, the P-700 can also be fitted with a nuclear warhead. The Granit’s nuclear warhead is a 500kt one. Enough to blow an aircraft carrier out of the water.
Unique Launch Capabilities
One thing that makes this missile special in particular is that it is wet-launched: The Granit was initially designed to be fitted to submarines. As a result, it was engineered to be fired from flooded tubes! When the decision was taken to fit P-700 to the Kirov and Kuznetsov ships, it was found to be easier and cheaper to keep the system unmodified. As such, when a Kirov or Kuznetsov fire a Granit, it is done from flooded tubes, as it would be done if fired from a submarine!
Retirement and Replacement
The Granit, however, is being retired!
The Kirov class ship Admiral Nakhimov has seen its P-700 tubes be replaced by Tsirkon tubes. The Zircon AshM is smaller and lighter compared to the Granit. It also embarks a smaller warhead. However, it compensates for this by traveling at hypersonic speeds, thereby carrying more kinetic energy with it on impact (speed up to Mach 9).
As for the Kuznetsov, its refit has seen the P-700 Granit being traded for a blend of P-800 Oniks (AshM) and Kalibr, either the 3M54T AshM or the 3M14K land attack variant.
-RBM
