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Oh, the wonders chips from dishwashers are able to unleash.

How come Zeus, King of the Gods, could not have foreseen it? Especially when his divine intuition was aware that in the future his thunderbolts would be replicated in Russia via Oreshnik – a seemingly harmless hazelnut tree.

Mythology prefigures post-everything reality.

Now let’s go back to Newton for a bit. Based on his formulas, a one meter long uranium projectile flying at very high speed is capable of perforating 6 meters of hard rock (to the sound of Deep Purple’s Highway Star?)

A warhead traveling at 1,200 meters per second is capable of perforating 46 meters of concrete.

Now imagine impact velocity greater than the speed of sound; the impact depth, of course, is exponentially fiercer.

Impact shock, at very high velocity, turns whatever is ahead into gas. A – kinetic – shock wave pops up as deep as 50 meters, swarming the deep underground and crushing, destroying – actually imploding – everything in its wake.

That’s what happened deep underground at the Yuzhmash plant in Dnepropetrovsk – as Oreshnik was conceived by improving these physical principles. And Russia only used blanks for this first Oreshnik test – instead of warheads.

Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back

Now cut to Russia and Kazakhstan’s Presidents Vladimir Putin and Kassym-Jomart Tokayev deepening their strategic partnership face to face in Astana – including a renewed drive for strengthening cooperation within the CSTO.

Additionally, Kazakhstan was officially invited to become a BRICS partner.

Putin answered quite a few press questions on Oreshnik and the wider NATO proxy war. But arguably what was most intriguing was his speech at a restricted attendance meeting of the CSTO Collective Security Council. Some of it deserves to be quoted at length – not least because of the President quipping about “customer satisfaction”:

“The Russian Iskander missile system and its modifications represent the Russian analogue of all three ATACMS missile modifications. The warhead weight in TNT equivalent is about the same, but Iskander has a longer range. The new U.S.-made PrSM missile is not superior to its Russian counterparts in any specification. The Storm Shadow air-launched missile, the French SCALP, and the German Taurus have a warhead weighing between 450 and 480 kilogrammes in TNT equivalent and a range of 500 to 650 kilometres. The German Taurus missile has a 650- kilometre range. The Kh-101 air-launched missile is the Russian analogue of these systems which is comparable in terms of power warhead, but significantly exceeds each of the European-made systems in terms of range. The new U.S.-made PrSM missiles, as I mentioned earlier, as well as the JASSM, are inferior to their Russian counterparts in terms of technical specifications. Without a doubt, we are aware of the number of the relevant weapons systems that are in service of our potential adversaries. We know how many of them are kept in storage facilities. We know their exact location, how many weapons have been supplied to Ukraine, and how many more are planned to be supplied. As far as the production of relevant missile systems and relevant equipment is concerned, Russia has 10 times more of them than the combined output of all NATO countries. Next year, we will increase the production by another 25 to 30 percent. We can see that the Kiev regime ringleaders are begging their masters for military equipment of a different kind. Let no one forget about the Kalibr, Kinzhal and Zirkon hypersonic missile systems, which are unmatched around the world in terms of their technical specifications. Their production is also being ramped up and is going at full speed. More such products may show up shortly on our menu of the products of this class, if I may put it that way. As they say, customer satisfaction is guaranteed.”

Meteorite collision ahead

Putin compared an Oreshnik strike with the impact from a collision with a meteorite: “We know from history what meteorites fell where, and what the consequences were. Sometimes it was enough to form entire lakes.” Even as he stressed that “publicity is inappropriate when dealing with new weapons”. That was exactly the case with Oreshnik: “We waited until the moment when we conducted the test and, in fact, saw a result. And then we made an announcement.”

That sets the context for what Mikhail Kovalchuk, the actual creator of these seemingly innocent hazelnuts, the post-everything replica of the thunderbolts of Zeus, told Izvestia on the sidelines of the IV Congress of Young Scientists  in the federal territory of Sirius.

Kovalchuk is the president of the Kurchatov Institute National Research Center. Essentially, he remarked how “the materials that Russia has that can withstand ultra-high temperatures made it possible to create the Oreshnik system and will make it possible to create other types of hypersonic weapons.”

The whole planet may be asking how did Russia manage to overtake everyone else: “Because we are one of the five world leaders (…) We have created hypersonic weapons in a short period of time. And these are materials that used to work at 1,500 degrees, then at 1,800, and these at 2,000, and we did it, while others did not.”

And there’s more: Kovalchuk said, “other materials that can withstand high temperatures will make it possible to create even more advanced weapons. The next step should be materials that can withstand 2,500-3,000 degrees.”

That would make possible, for instance, missiles flying at very low altitudes at Mach 15 or even Mach 20 creating even more utterly devastating impact – including plasma shock – than the already tested Oreshnik.

Putin, for his part, also said – almost casually – that the Ministry of Defense is currently “picking targets” for more strikes by Oreshnik, including Ukrainian “decision making centers”, industrial production sites and military facilities. Is NATO listening? Obviously not.

What Maximum Soft Power is all about

As Russia revamps the role of Zeus, China is busy revamping the role of Hermes.

Beijing is now selling U.S. dollar bonds in Saudi Arabia. That means that the more China sells these bonds, these “Arab” U.S. dollars can be diverted to Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) partner nations as loans, so they are able to repay their extorsion-style debts to the Hegemon-controlled IMF and the World Bank.

The best part is that these BRI partners can repay those dollar loans to China using – what else – the yuan, as well as the merchandise they produce or their natural resources.

Call it a fast De-Dollarization Highway. And no one should ever forget that China U.S. dollar bonds are backed by gold while U.S. dollar bonds are backed by a printer.

Assorted Western blah blah blah about a heavily indebted China is nonsense. China’s – avowedly huge – debt is overwhelmingly domestic debt in yuan. China uses its internal bond market to help companies invest their money and earn a decent return – with virtually no risk. And all that while stimulating the economy.

Now Beijing came up with the brilliant idea of issuing bonds in U.S. dollars to extract those petrodollars from Saudi, so they don’t go back directly to the U.S. Everybody knows that scores of nations are not buying up U.S. Treasuries and U.S. bonds like they used to. So bond yields need to go up. Beijing found a way to ensure borrowing yields remain high – making borrowing costs expensive for the U.S.

The most important vector is that these U.S. dollars raised from bonds will function as a loan out to a great deal of the Global South to pay off their exorbitant interest loans from the IMF and the World Bank. Instead of paying 20-30% interest, Beijing will just charge these nations the bond rate (5% or so).

So basically what China is doing is turning into a front to borrow cheap U.S. dollars for the Global South. This is what Maximum Soft Power is all about.

What will happen to those U.S. dollars repaid by the Global South? Excess liquidity will plunge the U.S. into another inflation crisis. Stock markets will boom – but interest rates will go up, making borrowing even more expensive. Couple that with high tariffs, and as a wily Hong Kong trader put it, “it’s Perfect Storm, baby.”

So welcome to China playing Hermes, son of Zeus and the gorgeous Pleiad Maia. Hermes, among his endless attributes, is the god of travelers, roads and trade (BRI! Connectivity corridors!), cunning, diplomacy, language, writing and astrology. The herald and personal messenger of Zeus, Hermes also happens to be a divine trickster (now buy those U.S. dollars in Saudi Arabia from me!)

Once again, here we see Russia playing chess – thinking several moves ahead – while China is playing Go (Weiqi 围棋), also thinking several moves ahead. And the partnership, all along, in synch, is spawning a lovely Greek mythology revival.

The hazel thunderbolts have rendered D.O.A. the entire Hegemon gambit against Russia. Bye bye “strategic advantage” acquired by provoking Moscow to strike with tactical nuclear weapons. Now Russia can strike anywhere, anytime, at 12,000 km/h. With no radiation involved and with no pile up of civilian casualties.

Talk about a kinetic shock wave – military and geopolitical. No wonder NATOstan is clueless. Zeus oversees the chessboard from up there with a smirk, drinking a cool bottle of Brunello.