Just wondering,

What type of SS-N* missiles were sold by the Ukraine to the United States ?
Like the ' Sunburn ' I heard some info about the U.S navy trying to purchase it off the Russians, but there envoy failed. Did they purchase any of the SS-N* family of missiles of former Soviet countries ?

Any info is appreciated.
Thank you, Kenshin


[edit on 3-12-2004 by Kenshin]

I don't think the US purchased any sunburns, as we already have a missile that we can tune to emulate a yahkont or sunburn for SSST purposes.

In the past, we purchased some KH-31's (AS-17) to use as supersonic target drones, but they had some serious performance issues wrt range at sea skimming levels. KH-31 was not designed for low altitude operation, and it did not operate well in the thick air.

The Clinton administration funded an upgrade program for Boeing engineers to actually go to Russia to improve the capabilities of the KH-31 so that it could meet our requirements, and some improvements were made, but the missile still had problems meeting the USN's requirements.

Russia wanted the US to buy a large quantity of the improved KH-31's at once (something like 300 missiles). The marginal improvement in performance, plus the high cost, and maintenence problems with the KH-31 made it not worth it, so we went a different route, e.g. the Vandal, IIRC.

The US wouldn't have gained any Russian technology there, we were offering to include Russia in a missile defence shield. The offer to buy the missiles was an incentive. It's just a SAM system, which we would have incorporated into the BMD shield (which would have included Russia).

If Russia was williing to offer S-300's to Western European NATO countries, she certainly couldn't expect them to be secret to the US. Besides, we had already received the tech through Israel, and Russia knew that.

The refusal was a political statement regarding the US's withdrawal from the ABM treaty, which we did later anyway (with Moscow's agreement).



[edit on 3-12-2004 by engineer]

Are you sure it was missle tech and not rocket tech.
Because we did aquire the Mark 33 rocket from them.