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Russia to boost missile attack warning system’s capabilities after upgrade

The radar stations of the Russian missile attack early warning system went into service quite recently and have a service life of over 30 years. Despite this, the system will be upgraded, the chief designer said

MOSCOW, February 15. /TASS/. The modernization of Russia’s missile attack early warning system will boost its potential and detection capabilities, Chief Designer of the Research Institute for Long-Range Radio Communications (part of RTI Group) Sergei Saprykin told TASS on Monday.

The radar stations of the Russian missile attack early warning system went into service quite recently and have a service life of over 30 years. Despite this, the system will be upgraded, the chief designer said.

"The upgrade is planned and concerns boosting the potential and measuring capabilities," Saprykin said.

As a result, the radar stations will get artificial intelligence elements but won’t start "thinking" on their own, he added.

"Just imagine that a locator intended for preventing a nuclear missile strike would start to ‘think’ and acquire intelligence," the chief designer said, warning against this scenario.

RTI Group CEO Pavel Laptayev earlier said in an interview with TASS that Russia was preparing a project of modernizing radar stations of its missile attack early warning system. In particular, there are plans to use the computing capacities of data processing centers, artificial intelligence (machine learning) and big data analysis. This will help considerably speed up the task of defining the characteristics and the type of detected objects and the direction of their flight.

Today the Russian missile attack early warning system consists of two echelons: the space segment that currently comprises four Tundra satellites and the ground-based component that consists of Voronezh-type radar stations that cover all missile-dangerous directions. The system is designated to detect within the shortest time possible and track ballistic missiles launched towards the territory of Russia or its allies.

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