Jumping to conclusions: Evidence suggests Russian Buk missile did not shoot down Malaysian Flt MH17.

By: Nelson Abdullah
Conscience of a Conservative

I came across an interesting discovery about the B777 Malaysian Flt MH17 shot down over the Ukraine. Everyone in both government and the mainstream news media (which at times seems to be the same thing) is saying the Boeing 777 was hit by a Russian Buk missile but this may not be true. When taking in to account what kind of missile system the Buk is, it is an air-burst, anti-missile missile with a fragmentation warhead designed to create a cloud of a hundred thousand high-speed projectiles to destroy an aircraft or incoming cruise missile, photos of the larger pieces of wreckage appear to be missing the multitude of holes from the fragmentation warhead. Compare these photos from two British newspapers, the Telegraph and the Guardian.

An article ran today on the Finance page of Townhall, http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/mikeshedlock/2014/07/21/video-of-mh17-hit-by-missile-n1864123?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl and supposedly shows a video of the missile impact. But more interesting is an update to the story filed by a reader, Jacob Dreizin, a US citizen who speaks both Russian and Ukrainian who provided this update a few hours ago.

Russian media has quoted multiple Russian defense experts as saying that “Buk” missiles are designed to explode within several hundred meters of a target, sending between 50,000 and 100,000 pieces of shrapnel in all directions at supersonic (maybe hypersonic) speeds. According to these experts, an aircraft met by a “Buk” would be instantly riddled with holes, and the wreckage would evince that type of damage pattern. However, the few large pieces of Malaysia 777 wreckage that we have seen so far don’t seem to fit the bill. In that case, was it really a “Buk”, or some other missile system? (And if the latter, is it even worth arguing over whether the rebels have a “Buk”?) Or was the plane not destroyed from the ground at all?

Just as a point of reference, a fairly accurate illustration of the affects of such a warhead was used in the 1977 movie Black Sunday. In the film terrorists created an explosive package with tens of thousands of metal shards and tested it inside a barn with these results.

Scene from Black Sunday directed by John Frankenheimer, produced by Robert Evans, and based on a novel by Thomas Harris

Incredibly, Wikipedia has the complete technical specs on the Russian Buk Missile system and how it was constructed and used with a fragmentation warhead which raises considerable doubt as to whether it was used to shoot down the Malaysian passenger jet. The important question is there are no signs of the affects from the fragmentation warhead on the larger pieces of wreckage. The Buk missile does not destroy its target solely by explosives. It destroys the target by shredding it. Read the following, it is very long and technical but here are two easy to understand paragraphs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buk_missile_system

Wikipedia: A proximity fuse aboard the missile determines when it will detonate, creating an expanding fragmentation pattern of missile components and warhead to intercept and destroy the target. A proximity fuse improves the “probability of kill” (or Pk) given the missile and target closure rates, which can be more than 2000 miles per hour / 3000 feet per second (or more than 3300 kilometers per hour / 900 meters per second).

9M317ME missile

The weight of the missile is 581 kg, including the 62 kg blast fragmentation warhead initiated by a dual-mode radar proximity fuze. Dimensions of the hull are 5.18 m length; 0.36 m maximum diameter. Range is 2.5–32 km in a 3S90M “Shtil-1” naval missile system. Altitude of targets from 15 m up to 15 km (and from 10 m to 10 km against other missiles). 9M317ME missiles can be fired at 2-second intervals, while its reaction (readiness) time is up to 10 s.

My name is Nelson Abdullah and I am Oldironsides.

One thought on “Jumping to conclusions: Evidence suggests Russian Buk missile did not shoot down Malaysian Flt MH17.”

manny says:

July 25, 2014 at 2:32 am

Great description and enlightening article….and a miracle..yes a miracle why our Aussie friends miraculously discovered a week after..a large fuselage portion in the bush with some windows intact. with a part that looked like it was riddled with “machine gun” like holes..that had been “overlooked”….
On the other hand..A simple release by Mr. Avakov of the Ukr Interior ministry would have gone a long way to solving this..as his security branch confiscated the ATC tapes immediately. Yet none of the Allies are pressing him..preferring instead a barrage of misinformation.

Peace
Manny