In late October, Vladimir Putin said Russia had successfully tested the Burevestnik, a nuclear-powered missile that he claimed could reach the United States. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called it an “absolute breakthrough in technology,” while Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said the West was “very afraid.” Pro-Kremlin media echoed that line with terms such as “superweapon,” “panic,” and “an unpleasant surprise.”
The author draws a parallel with the concept of Wunderwaffe, the term used in Nazi Germany for experimental weapons that were portrayed as capable of changing the course of the war. Talk of such systems grew especially loud once the Third Reich was already bogged down in a long conflict and losing ground. Many of those projects never moved beyond prototypes, were too expensive or too complex, or had little strategic effect.
Among the best-known examples were the V-1 and V-2. The V-1 was deployed from mid-1944 and more often struck residential areas than military targets: it spread fear but did not inflict decisive military damage on Britain. The V-2 became the world’s first suborbital rocket and later mattered more for missile and space development than for German battlefield success. Other projects included giant guns, super-heavy tanks, the Fritz-X guided bomb, and even more exotic unrealized concepts.
At the same time, Nazi propaganda presented these weapons as instruments of an imminent turning point. German newspapers claimed the new arms were changing the logic of war and undermining enemy morale.
“Our retaliation weapon is a revolution in military technology,” Joseph Goebbels declared in July 1944, promising that even more impressive systems were still to come.
The article argues that this rhetoric relied on vague notions such as “morale,” “future consequences,” and an “inevitable reversal,” while avoiding measurable results. Even when Germany was already losing on both the Eastern and Western fronts, party guidance for editors and activists insisted that new inventions would soon astonish enemies at sea, on land, and in the air.
The piece also highlights the downside of such messaging: inflated expectations turned into disappointment. In a diary entry dated June 18, 1944, Goebbels admitted that people were already betting the war would end within days, and that if those hopes failed, the government would be blamed. The article concludes that the cult of “wonder weapons” functioned primarily as a propaganda tool meant to sustain belief in victory as the regime’s real military and resource capacity was shrinking.