Bulava Missile Not Ready For Mass Production : Missiles and Bombs : Defense News Air Force Army Navy News

I think that there is some misunderstanding about Russian weapons development, as shown by the following story about the failures in the Bulava-MLBM.

The missile has failed 4 of its first 6 test flights, but this means something very different than it would in a US missile development program.

Simply put, the Soviets, and later the Russians, use missile tests to find design flaws and verify performance, while the western nations typically use tests to verify theoretical analysis.

While the testing protocol is different from previous Russian SLBMs, there have been no ground tests, as it is an adaptation of a ground based system, the test-fail-fix strategy continues.