World News

called Satan

I mean, that's kinda misleading.

"Satan" is a NATO reporting term, not a Russian one. And if that's an RS-28, it doesn't even apply to that missile; some news outlets called it "Satan II" because an earlier, different missile had "Satan" as its NATO reporting name decades back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat

The RS-28 Sarmat (Russian: РС-28 Сармат,[8] named after the Sarmatians;[9] NATO reporting name: SS-X-29[10] or SS-X-30[11]), often colloquially referred to as Satan II by media outlets, is a three-stage Russian silo-based, liquid-fueled, HGV-capable and FOBS-capable super-heavy intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) produced by the Makeyev Rocket Design Bureau.[8] It is intended to replace the Soviet R-36M ICBM in Russia's arsenal.[15]

That earlier missile, the R-36M that's being retired, is the one with the NATO reporting name of "Satan".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36_(missile)#R-36M

The R-36 (Russian: Р-36) is a family of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and space launch vehicles (Tsyklon) designed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The original R-36 was deployed under the GRAU index 8K67 and was given the NATO reporting name SS-9 Scarp. It was able to carry three warheads and was the first Soviet MRV (multiple re-entry vehicle) missile.[4] The later version, the R-36M, also known as RS20, was produced under the GRAU designations 15A14 and 15A18 and was given the NATO reporting name SS-18 Satan.

Iran has a habit of calling the US "Great Satan", but we don't care about that. Similarly, it's hard to see why Russia would place a lot of weight on a foreign reporting name.

And as blessing of nuclear weapons goes...we've done similar, had the atomic bomb crews who hit Japan blessed prior to having them drop them. Incidentally, the chaplain who did so wound up going through the footage of the incinerated landscape afterwards, wound up feeling really bad about the whole thing and ultimately became a pacifist.

https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/making-difference/conversion-catholic-priest-who-blessed-atomic-bomb-crews

Father George Zabelka, a Catholic chaplain with the U.S. Air Force, served as a priest for the airmen who dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and gave them his blessing. Days later he counseled an airman who had flown a low-level reconnaissance flight over the city of Nagasaki shortly after the detonation of “Fat Man.” The man described how thousands of scorched, twisted bodies writhed on the ground in the final throes of death, while those still on their feet wandered aimlessly in shock – flesh seared, melted, and falling off. The crewman’s description raised a stifled cry from the depths of Zabelka’s soul: “My God, what have we done?” Over the next twenty years, he gradually came to believe that he had been terribly wrong, that he had denied the very foundations of his faith by lending moral and religious support to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"If a soldier came to me and asked if he could put a bullet through a child's head, I would have told him absolutely not. That would be mortally sinful," he said.

But in 1945 on Tinian Island in the South Pacific, where the atomic bomb group was based, three planes every minute would take off around the clock, Zabelka said.

"Many of these planes went to Japan with the express purpose of killing not one child or one civilian but of slaughtering hundreds and thousands of children and civilians -- and I said nothing. ...

As a chaplain I often had to enter the world of the boys who were losing their minds because of something they did in war. I remember one young man who was engaged in the bombings of the cities of Japan. He was in the hospital on Tinian Island on the verge of a complete mental collapse.

He told me that he had been on a low-level bombing mission, flying right down one of the main streets of the city, when straight ahead of him appeared a little boy, in the middle of the street, looking up at the plane in childlike wonder. The man knew that in a few seconds the child would be burned to death by napalm which had already been released.

Zabelka said that 75,000 people were burned to death in one night of fire bombing over Tokyo. And hundreds of thousands were killed in Dresden and Hamburg, Germany, and Coventry, England, by aerial bombing.

"The fact that 45,000 human beings were killed by one bomb over Nagasaki was new only to the extent that it was one bomb that did it," Zabelka said.