Russia to deploy doomsday nukes.

Russian media appeared to threaten Europe and the world with an article in MK.ru, saying that a new nuclear torpedo could create towering tsunami waves and destroy vast swaths of Earth's population.

Russia's "Poseidon" nuclear torpedo, which leaked in 2015 before being confirmed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 2018, represents a different kind of nuclear weapon.

The US and Russia have, since the end of World War II, fought to match and exceed each other in a nuclear arms race that resulted in both countries commanding fleets of nuclear bombers, submarines, and silos of intercontinental missiles all scattered across each country.

But Russia's Poseidon takes a different course.

"Russia will soon deploy an underwater nuclear-powered drone which will make the whole multi-billion dollar system of US missile defense useless," MK.ru said, according to a BBC translation, making reference to the missile shield the US is building over Europe.

"An explosion of the drone's nuclear warhead will create a wave of between 400-500 (1,300-16,00 feet) meters high, capable of washing away all living things 1,500 (932) kilometers inland," the newspaper added.

Previously, scientists told Business Insider that Russia's Poseidon nuke could create tsunami-sized waves, but pegged the estimate at only 100-meter-high (330 feet) waves.

While all nuclear weapons pose a tremendous threat to human life on Earth because of their outright destructive power and ability to spread harmful radiation, the Poseidon has unique world-ending qualities.

The US designed its nuclear weapons to detonate in the air above a target, providing downward pressure. The US' nuclear weapons today have mainly been designed to fire on and destroy Russian nuclear weapons that sit in their silos, rather than to target cities and end human life.

But detonating the bomb in an ocean not only could cause tsunami waves that would indiscriminately wreak havoc on an entire continent, but it would also increase the radioactive fallout.

Russia's Poseidon missile is rumored to have a coating of cobalt metal, which Stephen Schwartz, an expert on nuclear history, said would "vaporize, condense, and then fall back to earth tens, hundreds, or thousands of miles from the site of the explosion."

Potentially, the weapon would render thousands of square miles of Earth's surface unlivable for decades.

"It's an insane weapon in the sense that it's probably as indiscriminate and lethal as you can make a nuclear weapon," Hans Kristensen, the director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, told Business Insider.