Why Russian Science Is More Advanced: Or The End of the Ocean Empires of the West

The Russians have done what others only theorized: they have miniaturized an entire nuclear plant. To test this wonder, they have fitted it to a Doomsday, undetectable torpedo — a quiet, apocalyptic warning to the West and its NATO allies, who, at the turn of every century, seem intent on threatening the Russian state.

Many see only its martial purpose; yet beyond its destructive possibility lies revelation — a new dawn of energy and exploration. Power as infinite as light has been conjured from the Russian mind.

The irony is exquisite. NATO’s slow, creeping expansion toward Russia’s borders has compelled Moscow to summon what the ancients called the gods of necessity. From that crucible has emerged not mere weaponry, but civilization’s next leap — the miniaturized atom, the compression of the cosmos into the machine. The star and the atom, once distant symbols of humanity’s aspiration, now collapse into one. And in that singular stroke of genius, the West glimpses its own fatigue, its scientific vanity laid bare.

A decade ago, I wrote an essay titled “Russian Science Is Amazing. So, Why Has American Science Taken Over the World?” I argued then that Russia’s scientific brilliance had long equaled — even surpassed — America’s, yet produced vastly different economic results. The difference was never scientific; it was civilizational.

America’s advantage lay not in discovery, but in the dark art of capitalization — the transmutation of suffering into capital. The enslavement of West Africans, the theft of Indigenous land, and the plunder of the globe created the reservoir of wealth from which Western science could commercialize its miracles.

Russia, by contrast, recoiled from such barbarism. It refused to build its intellectual world upon the scaffolding of human misery. Thus, the roots of Western technological dominance in the twentieth century lay not in genius, but in the brutal economics of empire.

Now that order trembles. The twenty-first century will be remembered as the moment civilization’s center escaped the Atlantic. Commerce and industry have flown, like a startled bird, from the United States to China. And the center of scientific gravity has followed, sliding eastward — toward Russia.

In the crucible of its war with NATO in Ukraine, Russia has unveiled extraordinary scientific and technical achievements. The Poseidon torpedo — this ocean-, time-, and space-defying nuclear plant — stands as a symbol of that leap. It embodies the central argument of my earlier essay: that Western innovation thrived not on superior genius, but on the stolen wealth, labor, and intellect of the Global South.

The ocean empires — Portugal, Spain, Britain, France, and later the United States — profited unequally and violently from every flicker of discovery elsewhere. They did not invent progress; they extracted it.

Alexander Dugin, the Russian philosopher, framed these powers with precision. The West, he wrote, gave rise to oceanic empires — mercantile machines that emerged suddenly to dominate all within reach of their ships. Their violence was unlike that of older empires: colder, mechanical, racial, absolute. Their “civilization” was built on the mathematics of exploitation.

But that world is ending. The Chinese commercial-industrial miracle and the Russian scientific renaissance have reversed the planetary order. In unveiling Russia’s next-generation nuclear-powered cruise missiles — with reactors reaching full power in seconds and speeds approaching three times the speed of sound — President Vladimir Putin declared that the Burevestnik and Poseidon “will ensure strategic parity for the whole twenty-first century.”

He is not wrong. His words mark not merely a military parity, but a metaphysical one — the reassertion of a civilizational principle opposed to the exploitative logic of the ocean empires. Russian achievement is as much moral as it is technological: the resurrection of science as service to civilization, not to commerce.

The French historian Emmanuel Todd captures this moment with clarity. “This is indeed the first American strategic defeat on a global scale,” he writes, “in a context of massive deindustrialization in the United States and difficult reindustrialization,” concluding that “it is already too late to compete [with China] industrially.”

Todd’s observation completes the prophecy. The Poseidon is not merely a weapon — it is an event. It marks the exhaustion of the Atlantic imagination, the quiet burial of the ocean empires that once terrorized the world from their maritime fortresses. It signals the end of the Western illusion: that violence could be made synonymous with progress.

The sea, which once bore the ships of empire, now bears their ghosts. From the stillness of the continent — from Russia and China alike — rises a new logic of civilization: patient, terrestrial, enduring.

The Atlantic age has ended. Thus begins the age of the civilizational mind.